1-HELLOWEEN

Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part II (1988)

Very few tunes anticipate the sound of an entire subgenre as powerfully as , the first song on Helloween’s game-changing third album. Ten years after its release, musicians the world over were frantically trying to replicate its magic ingredients. There were the heroic, nut-squeezing pipes of self-trained vocal dynamo Michael Kiske; Kai Hansen and Michael Weikath’s intricate, high-energy twin-guitar leads; lush symphonic backing; Ingo Schwichtenberg’s explosive percussive momentum; and lyrics about birds of prey in flight. It and contrasting with the pointed craziness of and . Sometime bonus track neatly ramps up the album’s quotient of fist-pumping power bangers, the singalong chorus given gravitas by a portentous, philosophical spoken-word section.