Helloween
Keeper Of The Seven Keys - The Legacy

THE REVIEW

Was there really a need to bring out after seventeen years such a famous title as the one this album boasts? For what purpose, then, if not for mere sales reasons? According to the band, this title was chosen precisely to redeem themselves from their past and to show everyone that Helloween is not just the two keepers and that despite the absence of two of their pillars in the lineup, the versatile elf Kai Hansen and the golden voice Kiske, they can still produce excellent work, work that presumably finds its progenitor in this, probably the best of the Deris era, superior to other good albums like "Better Than Raw" and "The Dark Ride". However, the title chosen by Weikath and company does nothing but force the birth of a confrontation between the past and its legacy, a confrontation in which the legacy finds itself miserably crushed by a past too brilliant to be repeated, casting many shadows over this album and making the past even more brilliant. However, despite the confrontation appearing so forced, I find it fair to try to judge this third Keeper Of The Seven Keys for what it is, that is a good album, which perhaps suffers from compactness and from an uneven quality in the various tracks.

The album presents itself in a lavish format and is made up of two CDs, for a total of thirteen tracks, among which two suites stand out, almost as if to further force the comparison with the first Keepers and the famous "Halloween" and "Keeper Of The Seven Keys". The first, "The King For A 1000 Years", the trailblazer of the first CD and therefore of the entire album, written by all the members of the group with ten hands, is the most beautiful thing Helloween has written in recent years: fourteen exciting minutes, full of light and shadows, cheerful, melancholic, and aggressive at the same time, with an excellent use of keyboards, rhythm changes, astonishing solos, and an evocative and compelling chorus, which leaves great hope for what will follow. Introduced by the evergreen bass of Grosskpof, "The Invisible Man" proves to be a good track, convincing and quite catchy, especially regarding the chorus. But after another seven fairly good minutes, with "Born On Judgement Day", the hope of finding in the stereo a Keeper worthy of its name begins to fade: as pleasing as it is and despite a remarkable bass solo, the track lacks freshness and sounds very familiar; "Pleasure Drone" certainly doesn't bring the smile back to your lips, because this time the track isn't even that pleasant to listen to, and Deris' voice becomes really unbearable, prompting a skip towards "Mrs. God", the first single extracted from the album, a rather insignificant little song in its barely three minutes, which does its job well without overdoing anything particularly striking. "Silent Rain" is, however, a very good track, compelling and equipped with an excellent chorus that once again, as in "The King For A 1000 Years", manages to be sad and cheerful at the same time and deals with a theme I have never seen tackled in this kind of music, which struck me deeply, pedophilia. This concludes the first part of the latest effort by the Hamburg pumpkins, and it is with the second suite, "Occasion Avenue", written entirely by the singer Deris, that the second CD opens: once again Helloween seeks the parallelism with the past, directly citing, in a sort of intro, "Eagle Fly Free", "Halloween", and "Keeper Of The Seven Keys", broadcast by a small radio that a phantom listener listens to, in search of something satisfying; his search stops when he tunes into "Occasion Avenue", which starts slowly and then proceeds with fast and powerful riffs, very good solos, and once again well executed rhythm changes. Despite being objectively an excellent track, it is still inferior to "The King For 1000 Years", and is followed by two lackluster tracks, a bland ballad where Deris duets with Candice Night, "Light The Universe", and "Do You Know What You're Fighting For", which boasts the title of the track with the worst chorus of the entire album. And if "Come Alive" is not much better, the very fast and hyper-fast "Shade In The Shadow" awakens the listener from a possible nap, placed before two very good tracks, the '80s styled "Get It Up" and the conclusive "My Life For One More Day", which nonetheless have the flaw of sounding once again not very original.

"Keeper Of The Seven Keys-The Legacy" is in conclusion a very good album, where however quantity has prevailed over quality, with some rather mediocre tracks that contribute to making the comparison with the past even less feasible: if Helloween had chosen to avoid inserting all those fillers, and if they had limited themselves to just one CD, which would have made the listening less chaotic, the result of the third "Keeper Of The Seven Keys" would have been quite different, and the comparison with the past much more feasible. What a shame.