Helloween "Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy" (SPV)
By Eric Chon
Tuesday. Dec 13, 1:26 AM
Legitimate power and majesty that's a rare thing these days.

Helloween are a band that took me a bit of time to get into. After all, my first foray into metal began with thrash and Metallica: how could I get into these silly operatic vocals and symphonic elements? Metal was all about the crunch and the unabated aggression! A part of me was drawn by the beauty and majesty of bands like Iron Maiden and, yes, Helloween. But I’d appreciate it and then quickly return to sanitarium of blistering heaviness.

Something changed later on, however. The more I gave those bands a chance, the more I fell in love with them. They gave me all the glory of power metal with an aggression and tongue-in-cheek humor that was sorely lacking amongst their contemporaries. And Helloween’s latest doesn’t miss a step from first track to last. It’s a rollercoaster ride of sweeping riffs, high-pitched belting vocals, and rock ‘n’ roll grandeur replete with powerful moments and, oftentimes, hilarious cheese that never gets old.

From the first moments of the truly epic opener, “King For a Thousand Years,” you are hooked. At a stunning 13 minutes, it remains the longest track on either disc. And yet it fails to bore. It has a roiling energy that is both captivating and liberating at the same time. At its very best, “The Legacy” captures this feeling and delivers a breathless journey through power metal’s very best landscapes: bold, elegant, and indelible. Songs like “The Shade and The Shadow” and “Silent Rain” stir the soul like a powerful storm while “Occasion Avenue” delivers an operatic and mythic experience much like the opener.

But while the peaks are stratospheric, the valleys can be equally shallow. “Light the Universe” is a mistaken exercise in maudlin drudgery. Yet another slow-tempo’d ballad filled with cliché imagery and horrible synth-strings. Not only that but rather than be at the end of either disc, it’s stuck as the second song on the second disc, destroying any momentum built (especially since it follows the excellent “Occasion Avenue”). And “Mrs. God” is just an incredibly cheesy and silly affair with no real redeeming value. On an album of great would-be classics, Helloween decided to throw in a typical power metal song… for what reason I have no idea.

Still, that leaves a lot of good here. Any fan of Helloween should pick this up in a flash of a blade. In fact, anyone who cares a little bit about melodic heavy metal as it was played in the ‘80s would do well to grab Keeper of the Seven Keys: The Legacy. Its legitimate power and majesty is a rare thing these days.
www.helloween.org
www.spvusa.com

Eric Chon

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