Helloween Take Ljubljana Through the Euro Power Metal Textbook, but With the Handbrake On (2011)
Location: Ljubljana / CUK Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Date: January 26, 2011
The thirteenth studio album, “7 Sinners” (2010), has finally brought the Hamburg pumpkin-heads to the Slovenian capital! For the second time overall. Almost exactly five years later. Five years and four days, to be precise. Helloween first played Ljubljana on January 23, 2006, when they were presenting “Keeper Of The Seven Keys pt. III: The Legacy”, officially released in 2005.
The “7 Sinners” tour is nowhere near as lavishly budgeted as its predecessor. Having Gamma Ray alongside you is a whole different proposition from having Stratovarius alongside you. On the “Gambing With The Devil” tour, Helloween served up a much richer stage set, a more generous use of lighting gear, a bigger set list and, as a result, longer shows, at times downright spectacular. Every night, after a long 15 years, Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray) and Michael Weikath, former partners in the golden eighties Helloween lineup, met shoulder to shoulder on stage during I Want Out.
But let’s get back to the present. Helloween’s new album “7 Sinners” (RockLine review HERE) turned out supremely well, so the thought of a tour following it automatically set off happy grinning and drooling. It’s great that Helloween called up their old comrades Stratovarius for company. The latter played a hugely important role in revitalizing and repopularizing the melodic approach in metal in the mid-nineties, and with their popularity at the time they indirectly helped re-integrate the “lost and found” Helloween on the scene too, after the shipwreck of “Pink Bubbles Go Ape” (the eureka moment and victory in 1994 was called “Master Of The RIngs”). But let’s not wander too far, and let’s not eat the sweetest part of the cake right away. Let’s head back to the hall at Kino Šiška instead.
The clock had long since struck eight. On stage, Avatar were sweating their hearts out. They’re a Swedish band that started out as a melodic death metal outfit, but stretched their musical horizons “to more” with their third, current studio album “Avatar” (2009). The new record offers a hugely interesting genre mix within the songs. Avatar are a bunch of cheerful, carefree lads who are comfortable in their own skin. They indulge in a tasty sense of humor. That’s why they picked an intro to match and opened their show with the theme from the action series “McGyver” by Lee David Zlotoff. Your mouth spreads into a grin all by itself. If Deeper Down is a mix of extreme branches of metal, embodied above all by a melodic death metal starting point with modern “breakdown” makeup, then Queen Of The Blades is an attempt to catch a whiff of rock n’ roll sin. Both songs rang out at Kino Šiška too and pointed to the wide creative range the band has newly picked up. So it’s something that can appeal to fans of new and old In Flames as well as The Haunted, and even lovers of power metal and raw rock n’ roll kick can prick up their ears! The tight playing, frontman Johannes’s relaxed banter and approachable attitude fired up the curious in the hall, and the band got a thunderous send-off after finishing their set, which lasted a good half hour. One more thing. On the bigger stage at Kino Šiška, Avatar managed to hang their logo above the drums, its letters made out of spotlight lamps, which the crowd at Zagreb’s Boogaloo the day before didn’t get to see.
Stratovarius are today among the legends of Euro power metal of the authentically Finnish kind! In the second half of the nineties (and later), Stratovarius were followed by power metal bands like Sonata Arctica, who are more or less just similar offshoots of Stratovarius. We can say the same even for Children Of Bodom (minus the growl vocals), and their influence even clings to a portion of gothic power metal acts of the Nightwish type. Stratovarius of course carry on today without Timo Tolkki, which is a phenomenon of its own. It’s pretty unusual for the man who creates a band to walk out on it. Usually the band dies with his departure. In the case of Stratovarius, as well as, grotesquely enough, Thin Lizzy, that isn’t true.
Still, three important members remain in the band today. Besides German drummer Joerg Michael and Swedish keyboardist Jens Johansson, the first name is surely also the band’s first throat. Timo Kotipelto, whose vocal color embodies such a large part of the Stratovarius sound that the band’s existence without Tolkki remains credible even today. If you replace the seemingly irreplaceable Tolkki in the band with a wonder kid by the name of Matias Kupiainen, the matter is pretty much sorted. He’s an exceptional virtuoso, classically trained, lightning fast, who splits even the thinnest hair in two with a laser-sharp blade, with remarkable precision and control of his instrument. The band released their new studio album (the second without Tolkki in the lineup), titled “Elysum”, two weeks before the Ljubljana visit, and right before the tour they were joined again by a convalescent who had happily come through a tumor operation: the legendary German drummer Joerg Michael. With his cannon-like power and speed, he once defended the colors of bands such as Rage, Grave Digger, Running Wild, Saxon,… The master of dancing across the double bass drum pedals played the best he knows how on the drums! Enjoying the energy that his barrage always unleashes was a particular honor this time. In the far right corner, behind his standard keyboard rig, stood, as always, one of the best keyboardists in rock and metal in the world. The one and only Jens Johansson, the man who in his day lent his musical talent to albums by Dio and Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force. So Stratovarius remain a strong entity, even if their new studio releases no longer show any particular freshness. The only problem is that they lost the bulk of their fan base, and so their golden times, which closed with the album “Infinite” and the tour in 2000, are sadly (for now) a thing of the past. Today they can only make their way onto stages as a support act.
Stratovarius are musical masters. The crossfire of solos between Johansson and Kupiainen remains the special thrill of watching their show. Kotipelto, just like the day before Ljubljana when we caught the band in Zagreb, skipped the highest registers of the songs, since he was singing with a sore throat. The guys prepared songs that more or less define the best-known moments of their rich discography. Straight away with the superb Hunting High And Low, then the absolute classics of the iron repertoire Speed Of Light, and the sparkling Kiss Of Judas with its charismatic riff and melody. There was room for a taste of the album “Elysum” with Darkest Hours too, and the lads lifted the mood in the closing stretch with a bundle of classic material that wound from Phoenix through the classic Forever to (“over-obligatory” queen of power metal speed) Black Diamond. A pleasant warm-up before Helloween and, above all, a pleasant warm-up for all the nostalgic hearts that have followed the band through two full decades of existence.
And Helloween? Helloween are so seasoned that they can pull the wool over the eyes of even the most naive crowd. The guys went on tour with a smaller budget than two years ago. On stage, there was a circular saw that carried seven different blades instead of teeth. That’s modeled on the cover of the new album, of course. That set design wasn’t put up in Zagreb the day before. A sold-out hall awaited Helloween below the stage. In fact, all the lads and lasses had “packed” themselves into the hall already for Stratovarius, they just didn’t make any particular racket. But when Helloween spilled across the stage, the crowd happily started stirring. Zagreb had neither such a hot crowd, nor such a big stage, nor such a packed hall. That’s why Helloween came across as a bit more approachable and a touch more “unhinged” than in Zagreb, where they truly showed nothing but bare routine. Ljubljana had routine plus a smidge more dynamism from the quintet on stage. The clowning around didn’t fall mostly to Andi Deris alone, either. Wikath, Grosskopf and Gerstner pulled plenty of “silliness” on stage too. Bumping into each other while playing harmonies in trios, pulling faces and other forms of mocking tomfoolery belong to the established repertoire of a live offering from a band like Helloween.
Deris confirmed that his voice still has a wide range, which also catches (with a slightly lower tuning!) the more demanding registers of hard-to-hit spots (I’m Alive, Halloween, and Ride The Sky in the encore). The boldly put-together set list also featured three brand-new songs. As expected, the show opens with the cheeky Are You Metal?, a typical Helloween prankster, followed in the middle of the concert by the excellent Where The Sinners Go, spiced with the drama theater of a contagious chorus, and then World Of Fantasy, which recently replaced You Stupid Mankind in the set list. Among the older classics, the ones that drew the most attention were the excellent “Better Than Raw” classic Handful Of Pain and the “Time Of The Oath” ballad of unrequited love Forever And More, which Deris and Gerstner performed in an unplugged (acoustic) version. That move proved to be a highly effective way to freshen up the mood of the show.
It’s just the way it is: the new era dictates trimmed-down concert offerings and rising ticket prices. Well, there’s really no complaining about the latter. But a bitter aftertaste remained after the show regarding the repertoire. An hour and three quarters is a nice slice of time for a headliner show, if you play and don’t talk, or talk only about the most essential things. This time, though, Helloween really overdid the implantation of all the skits and tomfoolery, which is otherwise expected, welcome and even required Helloween content. But this time they overdid it. The mile-long addressing of the crowd between the songs Halloween, and especially I Want Out, which thereby lost all its sense of even being a point in the repertoire, plus Dr. Stein in the encore on top of that, served up the fact of saving energy and stealing time. If we add the drum solo, which delivers nothing worth mentioning or that would stay etched in a concertgoer’s memory, then it’s clear that in this time Helloween could have played at least four more classics. If nothing else, they could have scrapped the “three-song ladder” and played the song Halloween in full, or Keeper Of The Seven Keys.
Kino Šiška once again bared its teeth when it came to the sound. Up front, the guitars could be heard. Farther from the stage less so, or poorly, while the drums took up more and more primacy in the mix. I don’t know how it was by the mixing desk, but right by the entrance to the hall the two guitars were too quiet. Concertgoers could already have experienced similar sonic shortcomings the day before in Zagreb.
The band say goodbye to the audience with Dr. Stein, which will be remembered above all for two daredevils who got themselves up as him and put smiles on the quintet’s faces. Helloween weren’t about to stand idly by either, and sent out their own Dr. Stein, who hurled a mountain of Helloween pumpkins (balloons) into the crowd. That wasn’t at the show the day before in Zagreb either. Compared to Zagreb, the Ljubljana crowd came out of it a lot better this time, as far as atmosphere goes. The crowd itself simply saved the band’s show. With their playfulness and letting loose, their die-hard fandom, in the fever of anticipation at every opening detonation of each song in the repertoire, they successfully covered up the laziness of their thriftily and routinely minded heroes on stage. So hats off to a one-of-a-kind crowd that breathed every fraction of a second nonstop, even during Deris’s endless “superstitions” and speechifying. At one point, even his bandmate Markus Grosskopf hinted at him during Dr. Stein in an extremely polite way: “Yeah, we’ve heard that one last night!” (Yeah, we’ve heard that one last night!”), but Andi wasn’t thrown off.
However you slice it. A good show. A really good show. With reservations. But worth the visit and the whole experience! Every true Helloween fan would be committing a great sin by ignorantly skipping this time’s laid-back visit from the pumpkin-heads to Slovenia. There was still plenty of energy, enough that in the middle of a stubborn winter, with a hearty dose of power metal, the rest of us thoroughly warmed our frozen bones too. On the German leg of the tour, Helloween are joined by their countrymen Pink Cream 69, singer Andreas Deris’s home band. The date and location closest to Slovenia are February 11, 2011, in Kaufbeuren, Germany. Anyone up for a road trip?
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
