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HELLOWEEN are still in a good mood. Ever since the band reunited with singer Michael Kiske and guitarist Kai Hansen in 2016, they’ve been one of the most in-demand bands in power metal, filling arenas across Europe and Japan and every gig has felt like a celebration. Giants & Monsters is the second album of the Pumpkins United era, and you can all but hear them grinning on every song.
It also has less expectation weighing on it. Their 2021 self-titled effort was a record that Teutonic metal fans had been waiting thirty years for, whereas this is more of a continuation of the party. HELLOWEEN don’t need to worry about where their mortgage payments are coming from anymore, and there was so much positive feeling from the last one that they could have easily tarted up a few unused old tracks and tossed them out into the world. Thankfully, they’ve not done that. Giants & Monsters is really bloody good and manages to improve on its predecessor.
Kicking off with Giants On The Run, it soon becomes clear that HELLOWEEN haven’t been resting on their laurels. The chemistry between Hansen and fellow guitarists Michael Weikath and Sascha Gerstner is palpable, years of throwing shapes together has turned them into a formidable riff-machine. The melodies are vibrant and full of life, and despite running for over six minutes, this opener flashes by.
The vocals sound enormous too. Hansen is listed as a singer but he’s really more of a back-up to Kiske and his co-conspirator Andi Deris, the two working together to create some booming choruses that’ll delight the festival crowds. Savior Of The World is a classic HELLOWEEN singalong, while the more mid-paced Hand Of God is eighties metal that’s been on a strict, high protein diet. These songs are proper rip-shirt-open-and-bellow anthems, and there’s a vitality through all of them, even the ballad.
So, why not the perfect score? Well, we hate to be a downer but there’s a few moments where HELLOWEEN’s enthusiasm works against them. It’s most noticeable on Under The Moonlight, which crosses the line into cheese and is too jovial for its own good. Giants & Monsters is reliably entertaining for most of the run time, but this sub-QUEEN effort should have been left on the cutting room floor.
Thankfully, it’s followed by the fantastic album-closer Majestic, a thundering great epic that rounds Giants & Monsters off on a soaring high note. Running to over eight minutes in length and with some utterly furious guitar work, it’s a powerhouse of a finisher and shows the septet in top form. There’s a few well-executed key and tempo changes, and it builds into a huge crescendo. Put simply, Majestic is the best song on the album and shows just how much effort went into creating this.
The band might be getting long in the tooth, but HELLOWEEN are clearly riding high on a wave of positivity and Giants & Monsters is a welcome addition to their burgeoning discography. It’s also distinctly old-school; they’re very much a classic power metal band and while the genre has grown harder and heavier in the past few decades, HELLOWEEN are shamelessly traditional. If the production were flimsier, this could have been released in the mid-eighties and in this case, that is very much a good thing. They aren’t as heavy as some of their contemporaries, but this is a cheerfully entertaining throwback. HELLOWEEN’s discography has veered between the exceptional and the…uh…not exceptional, multiple times, but Giants & Monsters may one day be considered a late-career classic.
Rating: 8/10
Giants And Monsters is out now via Reigning Phoenix Music.
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The post ALBUM REVIEW: Giants & Monsters – Helloween appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.
