For those of us drawn to the dark side, with an inexplicable fixation on the macabre, Halloween really is the most wonderful time of the year. And we’ve got the perfect song for the occasion.
Naturally, there are many heavy metal classics to soundtrack your Halloween celebrations this year. Black Sabbath, Type O Negative and Ghost have no shortage of music to mark the occasion, as do shock rockers like Alice Cooper, King Diamond and Rob Zombie – each of witch (yes, we spelled that wrong on purpose) having made a career out of their unhealthy obsession with all things dead.
But if you’re looking for the ultimate Halloween anthem – the one to rule them all, if you will – it has to be the song Halloween by the German power metal band Helloween.
It is 13 minutes of pumpkin-flavoured power metal mayhem!
This song, written by guitarist Kai Hansen, originally appeared on the band’s 1987 second full-length Keeper Of The Seven Keys: Part One - their first with singer Michael Kiske, and an album which would form the blueprint for the European power metal movement.
It all starts with a motif played on the first, second and third strings, each note left to ring into the next to create the kind of tension and unease you’d expect from a song named after an occasion to remember the dead.
Then the rhythm guitars come crashing in with an open E power chord, followed by a B power chord and then the tritone one fret down, nodding to discordance typified by the self-titled track that opens Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut and the Diamond Head classic Am I Evil?, which was famously covered by Metallica.
The early doominess of the track doesn’t stick around for long, however.
Just before the one-minute mark, they up the ante with some faster, palm-muted thrash metal ideas which are perfectly complimented by “Masquerade, masquerade!” gang vocals and Kiske’s sky-high tenor.
Fusing together the natural minor progressions pioneered by Iron Maiden with the speed of mid-80s American bands, Helloween found a template for a genre that would go on to include the likes of Angra, Dragonforce and Firewind – all of whom becoming world-renowned for the virtuoso guitarists within their ranks.
And in Helloween’s long-form magnus opus, there’s no shortage of fretboard-burning brilliance from Hansen himself, who ended up performing the large majority of the guitars on the Keeper Of The Seven Keys: Part One album after co-guitarist Michael Weikath was recovering from an illness.
“We were keen to make sure people realised there was a conceptual element to the albums,” Hansen once told Metal Hammer writer Malcolm Dome. “It wasn’t as if we’d come up with a story first and then tried to fit in all of the songs. We just noticed that some of the songs Michael and I had written separately – specifically Keeper Of The Seven Keys and Halloween – had a recurring theme. It was one of good and evil, heaven and hell, god and the devil, all battling it out. The Seven Keys were the way in which you could lock up the evil in the world.”
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this particular 13-minute ode to the supernatural is just how wonderfully cohesive it feels, unfolding as one perfectly constructed pièce de résistance instead of a frivolous stream of unrelated and disjointed ideas. With lyrics referring to little ghosts, spirits rising and magic in the air and an onslaught of bedazzling guitar work above all the razor-sharp riffing, it’s undoubtedly the ultimate heavy metal Halloween anthem.
So if you are trick or treating tonight: watch out, beware, listen and take care… there’s no way to escape the power of the unknown!
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