Helloween – Gambling With The Devil

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Produced by Charlie Bauerfeind

Almost exactly two years since their last album, Keeper of The Seven Keys: The Legacy, arguably Germany’s most popular power metal band are releasing another new album; a much more varied affair than the last one.

Unfortunately variation is only a plus point when you vary between different degrees of ‘good’. Gambling With The Devil straddles the stylistic line between the aggressive side and the big-dumb-happy-metal side of Helloween in such a way that rarely do two tracks of comparable quality follow each other. While the last album was the third part of a trilogy begun back in 1987, this is an entirely self contained story, linked together by a riddle which fans are invited to solve for a chance to win an overseas trip to see the band, with runners up prizes of signed guitars and Helloween prize bundles.

Intro track Crack The Riddle features Saxon’s Biff Byford providing a teasing voice over, then first song proper Kill It offers a great deal of promise for the album to come. It’s an aggressive and very heavy track, with vocalist Andi Deris wailing on top form. This promise isn’t exactly realised, however. The Saints goes back to the 1980s action cartoon theme music stuff that Helloween have always been disregarded as a serious metal band for in the past; the kind of thing Hammerfall now make heavier versions of.

As Long As I Fall does nothing to stop the downward slide. If it didn’t have some moderately heavy guitars in some places it could quite easily be a pop song. And not a very good pop song. It’s not like rock music needs another track with lyrics like “flying high” and “touch the sky”, is it? Thankfully Paint A New World moves back to the aggression of Kill It, and although the lyrics are nothing to write home about, Deris’ tone and the angry guitars do enough to carry the song.

The core of the riddle storyline is presented by the trilogy The Bells of The Seven Hells, Fallen To Pieces and I.M.E.. The first of this trinity is excellent. Just like Kill It, The Bells of the Seven Hells is all-out aggression and anger, with pummeling riffs and another great vocal display from Deris. Fallen To Pieces brings an epic feel to the sequence with clean chord-based verse melodies and a grand chorus backed by strings and keys, and I.M.E. sees the album’s best riff drive another venomous tirade.

All this good work, and as a centre-piece it really is outstanding, is immediately undone by the atrociously camp Can Do It. Comfortably a contender for the worst song of their career. Dreambound follows, and is fairly typical fast power metal fare, and closer Heaven Tells No Lies initially goes back to the sound of The Saints, before presenting a more considered approach half-way through with a shift of time and key and an excellent solo.

If they’d have just resisted the temptation to include some of the lame ’80s nonsense this could have been the best Deris-era Helloween album to date. Unfortunately those tracks drag the average down drastically, making it merely an average album, despite the excellence of Kill It, Paint A New World and the central trilogy of The Bells of The Seven Hells, Fallen To Pieces and I.M.E.. They probably felt it needed some singles, or something.

“ straddles the stylistic line ”

Tracklist: Crack The Riddle (Intro) / Kill It / The Saints / As Long As I Fall / Paint A New World / Final Fortune / The Bells of The Seven Hells / Fallen To Pieces / I.M.E. / Can Do It / Dreambound / Heaven Tells No Lies
Special Edition Bonus Disc: Find My Freedom / We Unite / As Long As I Fall (Video) / Trailer (Video)

Written by Andy Lye
More: Albums, Power Metal, Helloween