Ouch

Power metal is one of the genres that you can recognize instantly from the album artwork - there appear to be two very distinct styles of it, either extraordinarily detailed fantasy paintings which are perfectly analogous to the music's sound, or terrible 3D renders. Iron Maiden once released a single with a live photograph on the front and it just looked completely wrong. With the announcement of their latest album, 7 Sinners, Helloween have gone a different unexpected route - the centrepiece by which they're presenting themselves is a render that's much more immediately violent than I'm used to, with even the band's logo being changed so that it's now composed of an array of bad-tempered sharp things.

I still find it a weird moment when you find out the track listings for new albums, and compare the titles to what's come before them - you're looking at a list of unfamiliar phrases which are shortly to become songs. It's always been a strange trend that the songs with the oddest titles on an album turn out to be the best ones (notable examples including Sonata Arctica's The Boy Who Wanted To Be A Real Puppet and Helloween's Sun 4 The World) - so this time around, it appears that they've tried to deliberately invoke this by releasing an album composed of nothing but.

Where The Sinners Go 03:35
Are You Metal? 03:38
Who is Mr. Madman? 05:40
Raise The Noise 05:06
World Of Fantasy 05:15
Long Live The King 04:12
The Smile Of The Sun 04:37
You Stupid Mankind 04:05
If A Mountain Could Talk 06:43
The Sage, The Fool, The Sinner 04:00
My Sacrifice 05:00
Not Yet Today 01:11
Far In The Future 07:42

The video for Are You Metal is now online, which looks from the start like it's going to be in as horrifically poor taste as Gamma Ray's Into the Storm, but then takes on a twist (and I really did laugh at 3:11). As for the song, I've got to say that I don't think it's among the most spectacular of Helloween's efforts, but it sets the mood for this album as around the level of The Dark Ride, slightly more aggressive than before (as if looking at that cover wasn't enough of a subtle hint).

Edit: And I've just found 30-second samples on a music site in Switzerland. As you might expect, it would appear they've managed to perform the paradox of making something both harder and more melodic again - World of Fantasy in particular could be something from Gamma Ray.