Thirteen minutes and eighteen seconds out of thirty seven and a half. That is the share of Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I handed to a single song, more than a third of the running time spent on one sheet of the survey, and the figure tells you what kind of document you are holding before you have unrolled it: not a collection of songs but a chart, the first reliable map of a coast that European heavy metal had been sailing past for years without ever writing it down, and it burned every rougher sketch of that coast drawn before it. Every power metal band that came after it steers by this vellum. The vellum, however, is only half the map.
Recorded at Horus Sound Studio in Hannover between November 1986 and January 1987, produced by Tommy Newton with Tommy Hansen engineering and mixing, and released by Noise Records in 1987, the second full-length from the Hamburg quintet that had cut its teeth on the speed metal of Walls of Jericho two years earlier arrived with one decisive change in the chart room: Kai Hansen, who had sung that debut, kept only his guitar, and the lead vocal passed to Michael Kiske. Helloween were now Kiske, Hansen and Michael Weikath on guitars, Markus Grosskopf on bass and Ingo Schwichtenberg on drums. Everything follows from that exchange.
Speaking to Blabbermouth on 13 May 2018, Kiske described the band of those sessions plainly: "we were fearless, just fooling around, working with the elements of the bands we were excited about." You should take the sentence literally. The surveyors who drew this map had no instruments made for the job, so they built them out of what was lying on the table, the speed of the thrash and speed metal riff, the twin harmony guitar, a tenor who could hold a melody an octave above the gallop, and they pinned all of it to a single meridian, the major key, the line from which every other bearing on the sheet is taken.
A coastline in the major key
"Initiation", eighty one seconds of overture, is the compass rose printed in the corner of the sheet: ornamental, correctly oriented, and not yet territory. Then "I'm Alive" draws the first coastline at full speed and tears the old sea charts down the fold. The double kick runs underneath like a surveyor's chain dragged across rock, the riff runs at full speed metal tempo, and above it Kiske places a line that climbs where the older record would have barked, while Hansen and Weikath trade their solos with an exuberance the genre had not previously permitted itself. This is the door, and it opens outward.
"Future World" is the road everybody later travelled, released as a single ahead of the album and built as an anthem in the plainest sense: a riff with a hook in its tail, a chorus in the major key written for a hall to sing back, and a vocal line pitched high enough to lift the whole arrangement off the riff. The whole of the progeny, the epigones of the following decade included, learned their cadences here, and most of them learned only the cadences.
"A Tale That Wasn't Right" is the song that breaks the record's own mould. Weikath's ballad slows the gallop to a walk and removes the scaffolding of speed, and in the space left behind you hear what the new singer actually is: not a shrieker perched on a riff but a voice with range, breath and phrasing, the one instrument on the album that could not be borrowed from any earlier band. "A Little Time" and "Twilight of the Gods" fill in the interior between the headlands at pace, competent terrain surveyed by men who already know the way.
A map this exact is still half a map, and the missing half has its own sleeve.
The continent in thirteen minutes
"Halloween" is where the survey leaves the coast and walks inland. Thirteen minutes and eighteen seconds long, it is the album's argument in its most indulgent and its most complete form, a song that treats speed metal as a vehicle for narrative rather than a sprint, asking the two guitars and the voice, like three draughtsmen bent over one copper plate, to hold a listener over a distance speed metal rarely asked of anyone. It is the best thing on the record beyond dispute, and it is the place where the length stops being a risk and becomes the point. It is the continent the rest of the map exists to frame.
Then "Follow the Sign" ends the album with one minute and forty six seconds, a signpost rather than a song, pointing off the edge of the sheet toward territory the record does not contain. Put it beside "Initiation" and the limit of Part I is plain arithmetic: two frames take three minutes of a thirty seven and a half minute album, which leaves six songs, and one of them fills more than a third of the playing time. The production is the other limit. The mix is bright and light in the bottom, so that the gallop runs on floorboards where it wanted bedrock, and the bass and drums carry less weight than the writing asks of them. Neither fault touches the drawing itself.
What they do touch is the ceiling of the score. The band and label issued this as one half of a two part work, and Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II followed in 1988 to complete it. On its own, Part I is the coastline and one great expedition inland, with a legend in the corner that promises more than the sheet itself delivers. That is still more than almost any record of its decade achieved, and it is exactly why this one sits in the essential band rather than at the very top of it.
This record is for anyone who has ever sung along to a chorus in a major key over a double kick and wondered where the habit began. It began on this sheet, in 1987, in Hannover. Ignore it and you are navigating a genre by its copies, tracing the copies of copies of a map whose original has been lying open on the table since the day Kiske stepped up to the microphone, with the compass still pointing the same way.