Stage Buzz: Helloween @ Concord Music Hall
Helloween 2016
German power metal pioneers, Helloween, are no strangers to Chicago. So when the metal quintet take the stage at Concord Music Hall next Friday, March 4, you can bet they will receive a warm welcome.
Returning to North America to play select dates, the band will be supporting last year’s energetic, My God-Given Right (released May 29, 2015 via Nuclear Blast). It’s their seventh consecutive album produced by Charlie Bauerfeind (Blind Guardian, Angra, Saxon, etc.), and their first album released under the label Nuclear Blast since 2003’s Rabbit Don’t Come Easy. Formed in 1983 in Hamburg, the band were one of the progenitors of European power metal. Thirty-plus years and 15 studio albums later, the band can still deliver live.
Longtime bassist Markus Grosskopf told New Noise Magazine that My God-Given Right benefited from relaxed musical arrangements. “Today, we fool around more with arrangements, like what we did in the ’80s or something. But the basic track is a basic Helloween track. If somebody writes a song and the other player plays his instrument to it, he knows exactly what he needs to do, almost without asking, to make it sound like Helloween sounds like. That’s the experience you get when you do something for so many years.”
The album is a satisfactory mixture of the band’s ’80s roots and modern music production, though the band used old school analog recording gear (tape!) on the album. “The manner of recording changed a little bit because we wanted to have more of an analog feeling, a little bit of connection to the ’80s,” vocalist Andi Deris told Rock FM Moscow.
Deris further explained to Spaziorock “Old die-hard fans will find a connection to the ’80s and the new fans I hope will enjoy the 2015 arrangements. It’s a good mixture I think.”
Category: Featured, Stage Buzz, Weekly
