Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Helstar
Label: Ellefson Music Productions
Release: 2016
Length: 57:23
Rating: 4/5
Helstar, the indestructible veterans of American old school speed/thrash metal from Houston (Texas), are back with a new studio album, »Vampiro«. If you know the band, that title sounds awfully familiar. Back in 1989, Helstar released their fourth studio album, »Nosferatu«, which to this day remains the most ambitious and most revered record of their career.
With their last three studio albums, “The King of Hell” (2008), »Glory of Chaos« (2010) and »This Wicked Nest« (2014), Helstar showed, considering how many years they’ve been at it, an extraordinary creative spark and real artistic maturity, so they obviously felt the time was right for a kind of second chapter in the story of the Transylvanian count Vlad II and his bloodthirsty, good-for-nothing deeds. If history is any guide, when bands decide to tack a “part two” or sequel onto their (classic) album, the one that won them worldwide fame, huge respect and recognition, years later, it’s usually a double-edged sword. More often a bad move, if not a downright pointless one, than anything else. Well, with »Vampiro« you can’t say that at all.
»Vampiro« keeps the band’s creative charge burning even in their mature years, and it’s another superb studio achievement from the tough Texas metallers! What does that mean? Sum up what the last three studio albums taught us and the answers are staring you in the face.
First things first: James Rivera’s vocals! They’re incredibly well preserved, even at his age. The man screams and wails with an extreme explosiveness that hasn’t faded one bit through all his years of defiance. That authoritative and (mostly) clean melodic vocal stance, which dominates the guitar phrases, is often backed with extra vocal lines (three or more), especially in the choruses, and so once again harmonized to the hilt. These days Helstar also use more brutalized vocal excesses (the promised screeching, throaty growl), which beefs up the otherwise sinister and aggressive attitude of the new hellish record. Rivera is still in awe of Ronnie James Dio as well as Rob Halford, and that’s simply his constant. Still, James Rivera’s variable vocal pose, or approach, sounds incredibly committed, heartfelt and fully lived-in in every single second of this record.
Rob Trevino, who for many years formed a practically inseparable, eternal, even ideal guitar duo with Barragan in classic Helstar, announced his departure from the band, and he was replaced by a much younger but utterly promising and ambitious guitar virtuoso, Andrew Atwood, who came to Helstar from the lesser-known band The Scourge. Even so, the work of the two guitars remains completely “unfazed”. Atwood has fully made up for every piece of the puzzle that Trevino once brought to Helstar. On the new album, Larry Barragan steps into the role of main songwriter alongside Rivera, while Atwood deftly follows the familiar rhetoric of Barragan’s guitar playing, which is to say the rhetoric of Helstar guitar playing. Plainly put: you don’t notice the swap of Trevino for Atwood in Helstar at all. Outstanding riffs that are often dynamically “snapped” by crushing, hellish speed, a dash of aggression and a touch of the sinister, which fits right in with the stories of the greatest Transylvanian zombie and two-legged bloodsucker the album’s poetry is dedicated to. What’s more, the guitar work even gains in inspiration, which you feel especially in the pronounced guitar duels that the two guitarists trade as equals all the way through this record. The middle instrumental sections are further spiced with witty guitar solos, bristling energy and performance dynamite, and newcomer Atwood and seasoned Barragan don’t run out of it any time soon.
The new batch of songs keeps a welcome variety of ideas in its choice of lead motifs and the development of the compositions. That gives Helstar a tasty dynamic effect across the album, since it’s driven by the many moods that the seasoned quintet once again brings to life with mastery. As expected, the atmosphere is dark, tense, wicked, even schizophrenic. A true horror theater, in other words! The drama of all dramas. Without a shred of feeling for romance. There are also noticeable touches of baroque classicism, which evokes the feeling of a real film script (done according to Helstar’s metal recipe, of course).
In the way its melodies develop, »Vampiro« sounds like old school American metal. The poisonous riffs would rather veer toward half-tone solutions than give any sense of a musical “comedy”. It doesn’t get more authentic than that. Put this album in the player and you instantly connect with the elemental core of this branch of metal, which the first bands, Helstar at the head of them, created across the pond in the first half of the eighties. Maturity, experience and above all restrained ferocity and creative focus, along with a batch of exceptionally good compositions, are crowned by the superb production of good old Bill Metoyer. The new Helstar album is therefore incredibly sharp and jagged, and it feels like the toughest album of Helstar’s career.
The album has just one flaw. It’s at least fifteen minutes too long. Even so, don’t overlook the delightful fact that (not to be modest about it) “Nosferatu” has, after 27 years, been born again!
Helstar – Black Cathedral:
Line-up
James Rivera – vocals
Larry Barragan – guitar
Andrew Atwood – guitar
Garrick Smith bass guitar
Mikey Lewis – drums
Production
Bill Metoyer
Track list
- Awaken Into Darkness
- Blood Lust
- To Dust You Will Become
- Off With His Head
- From the Pulpit to the Pit
- To Their Death Beds They Fell
- Malediction
- Repent in Fire
- Abolish the Sun
- Black Cathedral
- Dreamless Sleep
