?Classics? of power metal #5: HELLOWEEN - The Dark Ride (2000), revisited

Past exposure to this band/record:  I am already familiar with The Dark Ride.

 

I sometimes imagine what Helloween listeners thought when after a short intro track, The Dark Ride provides a song called "Mr. Torture."  The track is built around a very down-tuned almost nu-metal riff whilst the singer growls about a theater of pain.  This is Helloween?  And then the chorus gives a gruff soaring melody about... wait, did he say "just pick up your phone?"  Hypothetical listener's eyes and ears open in disbelief, requiring a few minutes' worth of lyrics like "you can catch him on his website/Has a livechat every weeknight" to properly register and process what the song is actually about, and another few minutes to figure out whether they like or hate it.  The band has always had a goofball sense of humor, but the jokes aren't usually twisted in quite this way.  What just happened here?

That's not really a realistic narrative, though.  Maybe The Dark Ride is a bit of a shock to the system if one comes directly from the Keeper Of The Seven Keys duology.  But let's provide some context.  Do keep in mind, although I've listened to a fair amount of Helloween, I haven't listened too much deeper than the singles from most of their '90s records except for a full listen to 1998's Better Than Raw in preparation for writing this, so this is a bit of a place of ignorance here.  But if I were putting the least charitable, most insulting possible spin on things, I'd say this: Helloween hit a crossroads after fans revolted en masse against their attempts to keep innovating and not stay complacent, as fans do.  But in this case, people didn't only hate Pink Bubbles Go Ape or Chameleon because they were different from what came before, but mostly because they weren't actually any good.  Having over the years been either abandoned by or alienating core members like Kai Hansen, Michael Kiske, and Ingo Schwichtenberg, bassist Markus Grosskopf and guitarist/mastermind Michael Weikath kept doggedly trying to drive the zombie corpse of their band.  They recruited vocalist Andi Deris, a replacement-level Kiske-alike willing to vow to only write metal songs*, and cranked out replacement-level Helloween songs for the next few decades to the tiny population of weirdos who hadn't yet moved on to Gamma Ray (or Gothenburg melodeath, or, I dunno, trip-hop).  The rest of the world recognized that we'd already gotten the one-two-three of Jericho and the Keepers records out of Helloween, and that it wasn't the '80s anymore.

When you tug on the threads of that super-snarky story, it quickly breaks down, for a few reasons.  One is that 1994's Master Of The Rings and its successors do in fact have their own legions, albeit small ones, of fans.  To these listeners, it was a thrill to hear Helloween sounding like themselves again, recording enjoyable songs that played to their strengths, whilst gradually incorporating a few new wrinkles to reflect both the changing times and the band's changing selves.  Maybe due to the efforts of underheralded newbies Roland Grapow (lead guitar) and Uli Kulch (drums), the group sounded rejuvenated.  As a singles listener, I think they were doing something right during those years.  For instance, "Power" is pretty hard to argue with, "Why?" is a legit banger, and "Perfect Gentleman" is pretty fun.  There's also another even bigger problem with the previous paragraph's dismissive view of post-Keepers Helloween, though.  It can't account for The Dark Ride.  

 

Ride is recognizably Helloween, but nobody will mistake it for a Keepers-alike.  It's bombastic, yet stunningly free of cheese.  It's dark, yet not forced, nihilistic, or hyper-aggressive.  It sounds forward looking, and not dated to the early 2000s the way so much music of its time is.  Did Helloween get it so right through reinventing themselves in an acute sense?  I'm not sure I agree with Wikipedia's summary of The Dark Ride that "the album's style was quite different from Better Than Raw as it had a much darker sound, drop-tuned guitars, and gruffer vocals."  Is it so different, though?  Andi going gruff is seriously all over Raw, which also features its share of down-tuned guitar work.  '90s Helloween listeners also wouldn't have been surprised at all to hear a heavy dose of keyboards driving the songs on Ride, because studio-guest member Jörn Ellerbrock had also been a huge part of the band's sound for years.  I'd challenge one to name a single element of Ride that wasn't presaged by something on Raw.

So, The Dark Ride isn't particularly innovative.  What it is is packed wall-to-wall with classics.  It's actually a very slightly slow start for me.  I'm not a huge devotee of "Mr. Torture," but it makes me smile, they commit to the bit... and as far as I can tell, that's the only joke song on the record.  We move onto the solid "All Over The Nations," one of several songs that seems designed to say "hey, look, this is still Helloween!  See, machine-gun drumming, uplifting chorus, etc!"  Then "Escalation 666" goes back to the themes of misery and violence that "Mr. Torture" hinted at... and it doesn't seem like they're joking this time.  I guess maybe that's the one unique thing this record brings to the discography; there's a remarkable lack of jokiness from Happy Happy Helloween.  Maybe the lyrical nod to Metallica in the title track could be seen as cheeky, but otherwise I'm struggling to come up with many more funny bits.

I keep waiting for the record to succumb to excess - there's a lot of record, and Helloween are prone to excess.  The opposite happens; they settle into their groove and reel off one great song after another.  The best I can describe it is going back to my ever-present love of polished songwriting; this record could only come from vets of the business who've spent a lot of years learning how to put a song together.  "The Departed (Sun Is Going Down)" in particular stands out as one that has a bunch of parts that would get old quickly on their own, but they fit together and keep each other fresh.  I absolutely ought to be cringing a little bit at melodramatic grimdark songs like "Mirror Mirror" or "I Live For Your Pain;" I just find them incredibly catchy.  

 

Helloween aren't afraid of songs about darkness, but they're going to side with the Keeper against the Satan in the end, maybe even throwing in enough pseudo-religious imagery to make you wonder if you're listening to a stealth Christian band blessed with the power of kickass riffs.  So it's a natural progression to the anathemic "We Damn The Night," with Andi unashamedly declaring that world that "we believe in the everlasting light" and "we will fight for what's just and what's right."  Yeah, we knew you would, you big power-metal softies.  And you're going to punctuate it with a keyboard solo to set up a classic arpeggiated guitar solo, because you're sometimes really good at your jobs.  They also have a few long songs on every record, leading them to occasionally be accused of being a prog-metal band (which they really, really, are not).  That excess gets restrained here, with the 8:48 "The Dark Ride" (the song) really being the only indulgence in to long-form stuff.  TDR is actually one of their better "epics," taking the listener on a journey befitting its spot as the album closer.  I mean, maybe the transitions could be a little smoother, and maybe the order of the crazy spinning guitar parts and the reassuring slowed down bass-driven parts could have more clearly illustrated the transition from the scornful "I know you'll follow me down" to the part where "we all" "come about" and decide how we're going to face this dark ride of life, but I'm not going to complain about a bunch of good parts fitting together reasonably well.

Focusing on vocals, as I'm wont to do, let me mention one more time that Andi delivers a bravura performance all record long.  He somehow figured out the way to please an annoying listener like me who responds to an earnest singalong chorus by saying "give me some edge!" whilst responding to grittier vocals with "can't you hire someone who can sing on key?"  Turns out the solution is to do the power metal thing a tiny bit lower.  He finds exactly the perfect register to sound great with the mid-range vox, and when he goes high there's a touch of growl like he's straining a little to hit the notes... but hits them every time.  A step or two higher, and this would sound like '80s-inspired self-plagiarism and would instantly register to my ears as cheese (and in fact, that is my reaction to Andi's higher-pitched choruses on other records).  A step lower and it'd sound like it was playacting at being edgy, and would also register as cheese.  Just like with the songwriting, the singing isn't dramatically different than on any other record, except for the part in which this band who I usually find so maddeningly inconsistent are just killing it, track after track.

Speaking of being really good at one's job, I skipped over the big** single, the pseudo-ballad "If I Could Fly."  If one has to respect the craft that goes into writing an earwormy four-minute pop song that doesn't suck, wouldn't writing an earwormy four-minute pop song that's also metal as fuck merit all sorts of extra credit?  I call IICF a "pseudo-ballad" because it feels as though it's a slower, softer number, despite the fact that they only let that memorable keyboard line play on its own for ten seconds or so before augmenting it with a propulsive riff, heavy on the bass.  It's not even a particularly slow song, so much as an inspirational one with a chorus that will never leave one's head.  Still not sick of it!  The part where the narrator proclaims "no fear of the unknown - no more, no more," takes a breath, and bursts into the chorus, well, that's the stuff power metal ought to be made of.  10/10, no notes. 

I've occasionally said that The Dark Ride might be my favorite Helloween record, "depending on my mood," and I may have deflected by suggesting that this opinion was partly a contrarian take.  I remembered Ride being good.  I don't think I remembered that it was quite this good.  In a perfect world, Ride would have the same kind of influence as Keepers, with Helloween held up as a landmark example of how the core power metal sound can translate smoothly into the metal scene of the twenty-first century.  Instead, it ended up being, to me, a bit of a false resurrection in that, sans Roland and Uli, the group drifted back to their usual inconsistent ways.  There are a bunch more Helloween records, all of which have something worthwhile about them, and, well, they're just Helloween records****.  They don't shake any paradigms.  Just to keep things weird, the group did manage one more that I'd call a minor classic, 2013's Straight Out Of Hell; it is sandwiched right between a record I literally cannot remember a single thing about (7 Sinners) and one that I think is pretty clearly among their very weakest efforts (My God-Given Right).  So far the much-ballyhooed "Pumpkins United" lineup has been good for... a couple cool songs, I suppose

 

I said in the last post that if all power metal sounded like HammerFall's Glory To The Brave, I'd have no interest in the genre.  If all power metal landed for me the way The Dark Ride does, I might never take off my headphones.  It's fun when guys who claim to have been there when power metal was invented*** are still out there showing everyone how to make the old style work in a new decade.

Favorite track:  "If I Could Fly"

Runner up:  "We Damn The Night"

Least favorite track:  "Salvation"

Rating:  5/5

Will I come back to Helloween?

Already do, despite my conviction that they'll never top this one.

Things I learned about power metal:

- There's an exact sweet spot of "edge" and "darkness" that power metal can hit with glorious results.

- There's an exact vocal range that I want from my metal singers.  Not too high/flowery, not too low/gruff, just right.

- As much as I claim to crave innovation, I really just want catchy tunes with a veneer of grit.

Next:  Early impressions of Avantasia's The Metal Opera, whenever I get around to it!

*Michael, in his own words, is not a metal songwriter, and hasn't been one in many, many, years.  Or at least that was his explanation for why he didn't have any writing credits on the big reunion record, Helloween

 

**Big for a niche band that used to be famous, anyway.

 

***A dubious claim, as I'm learning in my journey through the subgenre, but whatever.

 

****The incredibly mundane explanation for why, during my Helloween exploration phase about five years ago, I chose to spend so much time with their late-period work while skimming over so much of their middle period?  I just listened to the particular records that were available on my streaming app at that particular moment in time.