Respect is due to any band that survives for 30 years, especially one that pretty much ends up sowing the seeds of an entire genre. Whether or not they’d admit it, the majority of power metal acts owe a debt of some sort to Helloween, whose My God-Given Right is their 15th studio release.
OK, the Germans haven’t always covered themselves in glory – they became a bit stodgy in the 1990s and their covers album, Metal Jukebox, was rank – but when the band are on their game, as they’ve been throughout this current millennium, the results are always worth hearing.
Produced again with razor-like precision by Charlie Bauerfeind (Primal Fear, Blind Guardian, Saxon), My God-Given Right is a typical latterday Helloween album – grand in scope, brash and ferocious but also deceptively tuneful, and as you’d expect of a band that once penned an ode to heavy metal hamsters, infused by a nonsensical brand of wit.
Still utterly, gloriously ludicrous, Helloween inhabit a world in which any man can be a hero, God loves rock’n’roll and no drunken plane flight or act of righteous barbarism is too cheesy to inspire a fist-punching anthem. Yeah, the silly old bastards have done it again./o:p
