As much as it pains me to say it, Helloween fans seem to be in general at a level of idiocy about equivalent to that of the X-Box Live community. There is a continual war between factions that like the new material versus the old, with special hatred reserved for the silliness that Andi Deris brought to the band, ignoring that it's the exact same style that they had shortly before the revered hero Michael Kiske completely ran the band into the ground. Despite always having had songs like Rise and Fall featuring a swanee-whistle, somehow some people got the impression that there was any point in somehow taking all of this seriously. So it wasn't any surprise that there was a positively huge amount of uproar over Unarmed, an anniversary album that was surely a wilful baiting attempt where the band redid a lot of their old classics in wildly different styles outside of their usual metal sound. A lot of it was hit-or-miss (I thought that the soft-rock Eagle Fly Free was especially weird) but I honestly think that this is among the greatest things they've ever done.

Keepers Trilogy is a seventeen-minute long medley of the three title songs from the Keeper of the Seven Keys albums, re-done with the Prague Symphony Orchestra. It's like what Metallica did with S&M (so I suppose this, if anything, would be H&S), and I think it's spectacular.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC74W7CzAAw

Even bits that I thought didn't work in the original songs come out well in the orchestral version - the introduction to Halloween's been transferred from guitars to horns, making it almost sound like Holst's Mars, and after that it becomes a mixture that's somewhere in between two styles, not classical in the normal sense but like metal being played on classical instruments. By the time Keeper of the Seven Keys comes around, it's turned into a Broadway musical, eventually dissolving into an uncharacteristically mellow chorus and piano solo. In the second part of the video, the horns and strings come back interplaying in the background all the way through to the triumphant chorus of King for 1000 Years, eventually getting to the discordant later stages of the song that then take on the theme from Halloween and fade back to where the medley started.

So to sum up, of course Unarmed hasn't ruined Helloween. Because lupineangel already did that when he mentioned that Michael Kiske's hair made him look like Pat Sharpe.