While looking up The Song That Makes You Want To Kill Yourself on Youtube again (as thanks indirectly to Whitney's encouragement I have accidentally learned how to play it), I was surprised to see that Michael Kiske had released a new solo album. It's called Past in Different Ways, and even though it lives up to its name, it's the strangest one yet.

For those who don't know his history, I should explain - despite being one of the initial successful lineup of Helloween, Michael Kiske had the unfortunate situation of hating metal even though he was something of an iconic voice in it. So after he tried to turn the band into a Beatles-style pop group with songs like the one I linked above, they kicked him out and got an emergency vocalist to bring them back again. Meanwhile, Kiske himself decided to become James Blunt and released a lot of acoustic pastelly music while wearing a daft hat. (I have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to get Whitney into his new albums just for the sheer irony of it.) Though his alleged hate of metal hasn't stopped him from making guest apperances with virtually everybody else anyway.

And on this new album - as I realized while I scanned down the track listing, and is hinted at by the title - he's taken the old songs that he wrote for Helloween and reworked them as he wanted them to be. Mellow. Compare A Little Time (original version) and the new alternate-alternate version to get a summary of the level of surrealism that we're dealing with here.