Helloween – Walls Of Jericho

There are some classic metal bands who were still searching their own ways with their first albums, like Judas Priest, Accept or Saxon. And there are those whose first albums are stone cold classics, like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden or Manowar. Well, Helloween is somewhere between the two. It's quite difficult to evaluate Walls of Jericho, because the comparison is inevitable with the follow up albums: the two perfect and genre defining parts of Keeper of the Seven Keys.

However, if we place ourselves back to 1985, Walls of Jericho is a groundbreaking album with stunning instrumental and vocal performances. The awesome painting on the cover and the logo - one of the elite designs in metal - already hint at serious business.

It worth emphasizing not only the super melodic and super fast twin solo guitar playing, but the mastery of the rhythm section of Markus Grosskopf and Ingo Schwichtenberg. All of this creates a strong base for the further development of this band.

Kai Hansen's vocals are also phenomenal - although it has to be remarked that it suffers from a comparison to Michael Kiske - which is a compliment of Kiske, one of the very best metal singers ever, and not a downgrade of Hansen, of course.

What really prevents this album to be hailed as equal to the Keeper records is the uneven level of songwriting. The intro of the album already betrays it, since it's an excerpt from a Halloween movie soundtrack, while both Keeper albums start with an own composition which instantly lets you guess that something special is on its way.

There are a few songs which shows that strong identity and uniqueness which is a staple of each and every song on the two Keepers. Ride the Sky is of course a true classic - an ars poetica of Kai and an ever present live staple of Helloween and Gamma Ray, too. How Many Tears is also a top epic song - you should check out how the current 7 line up play it! Starlight from the EP preceding the Walls of Jericho album is also something special, just like Judas (also not on the original album). Murderer from the EP just makes your pulse run - oh how it starts! Heavy Metal is the Law is also a classic, in large part due to its awesome title and its crowd moving energy. Victim of Fate is also a great and versatile song, though it is worth noting how better its later Kiske version sounds.

The other songs mostly lack these features, which doesn't mean they are not thoroughly enjoyable. It means that although they were counted as top level awesome songs in the speed metal scene of 1984-86, they sound as also rans in the light of the stratospheric development of Helloween and the power metal genre in general.

The lyrics sometimes seem naive or generic, going with - and not above - the current flow of that era. Even though the influence of Judas Priest has usually come up in the music Helloween (to this very day), on Walls of Jericho sometimes this seems stronger than the identity of this young band (like Phantoms of Death which is like a Judas Priest leftover). While using classical pieces was already a specific thing of Accept then, Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King theme is inserted in Gorgar: great fun, though not original. I risk to say that a couple of tracks seem childish, like Reptile, Gorgar or Warrior.

The content and the realization of this double CD is excellent. It serves justice to this band and to the music, and we have everything on these 2 discs what we should know from the pre-Keeper era of Helloween, including their demo and compilation tracks. It's an essential part of your Helloween collection. It makes the quantum leap to the height of the Keeper era just even more astounding.

Be careful, the live tracks of the Judas ep are faked and were not taken by the original release. Comparing to Guardians of the original record, Kai Hansens voice isn’t overleaping at the first refrain… here they took the studio version and mixed it with some sound of the crowd.