I can still remember the first time I heard of Helloween, and the particularly German brand of power metal. It was somewhere in 1996 and the band had just released The Time of the Oath, the second album with vocalist Andi Deris after the departure of frontman Michael Kiske. A metal and rock programme on Dutch music channel TMF was showing the video for first single outing Power and I was absolutely taken by the catchy chorus, the speedy metal and the twin guitar solos. I had started getting into old school heavy metal a few years before, and this was right up my alley. However, I do remember thinking, ‘this will never last. I’ll love this now, but I know I will have grown tired by it by the next studio album.’ Because that’s almost always the way things go with things which catch on immediately, isn’t it? Continue reading
Category Archives: RP
Bad Religion – True North (2013)
With sixteen albums under their belt and a career spanning over three decades, the American punk rock band Bad Religion is nothing short of an institute. From an impressive run back in the old days with classics like Against the Grain, Generator and Suffer, to the mainstream success of the nineties (and the release of some truly mediocre work in a Brett Gurewitz-less line-up) and the subsequent return to Epitaph Records, the band has seen some incredible highs as well as a few lows, and are still around to underline the fact that no, punk is not dead at all. Continue reading
Rush – Clockwork Angels (2012)
This review has been a long time coming. Released almost a year ago, it had been the strongest contender for being my album of the year, just before Spanish folk rockers Mägo de Oz decided to release a new album just before 2012 came to a close (a write-up about that album and why exactly it became my favourite album of the year can be found here). In the end though, there isn’t much qualitative leeway between both Mägo’s new effort and the brand new studio album from Canadian prog legend Rush, as both albums deliver top notch music with the respective bands performing at the top of their game. Continue reading
soundsfromthedarkside 