Helloween-Unarmed: Best of 25th anniversary

2010


The trend of re-recording one's own songs has certainly grown over the years. It used to be a couple of them might be tacked onto the end of an album, but now we get more and more whole albums of a band re-recording their own tracks. Now my initial thinking on any album of this variety is that I really wish they had used their time to create new music rather than re-doing their own material. Maybe that's just me, but I feel if you are going to create then give us something to new. However I would probably rather a band do a re-recording album instead of the old greatest hits package. That way at least there is some possibility of some type of new ideas finding their way into the results. Helloween are one of the real creators of the whole European power metal sound. Being leaders I suppose it's not too surprising that is one of the better collections of re-recordings I have come across. They don't just re-record old songs because they actually do far more re-working than most bands who do this style of album. That's not to say that every track works because the styles are so varied that most people are not likely to be into every song. However it's obvious Helloween didn't do this album to please everyone. They did it because it's what they wanted to do in celebration of their quarter century anniversary. Die hard fans are likely the ones who are going to be most interesting in this release and even then everyone will find some songs they will listen to repeatedly and others they listen to once or twice and that's it. Sure, I would have prefered an album of originals, but not bad for what it is.