Patrick: When your band exists twenty-five years, it needs to be celebrated. The guys of Helloween thought likewise; and so a couple of classic tracks were taken from the shelf and the dust was blown of them. And just not a little: the band wanted to see how their hits would sound in a totally different way. And so the tracks were completely rearranged and/or reversed.
And frankly, I do like them going for a fresh approach; simply remastering the songs or record them again on exactly the same way, had been way too easy. Isn’t it? And that is why things have radically been knocked over. ‘Dr Stein’ now has a saxophone rumbling all over the track, tracks like ‘Future World’ and ‘Eagle Fly Free’ (without the flaming guitar solo!) have been converted into acoustic tracks and you can hear a children's choir tumble over the chorus in ‘I Want Out’. At ‘The Keeper's Trilogy’ ‘Keeper Of The Seven Keys,’ ‘Halloween’ and ‘The King For A 1000 Years’ are renovated into a 17 minutes lasting soundtrack, complete with Gregorian choir and performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra. The song turns out quite epic and is without doubt the best effort on ‘Unarmed’. Slight plus points are there for ‘Future World’, ‘Dr. Stein' and 'Where The Rain Grows‘ but that is about it. The end result, which may well be labelled as an acoustic pop / rock album, has not turned out successful in general, to say the least (with the annoying ‘Eagly Fly Free’ as ultimate depth, argh!).
I seriously wonder why the band has stripped the songs so drastically. Another approach is fine, but was so radical really necessary? Helloween has had some unsuccessful moments (‘Chameleon’, ‘Metal Jukebox’) in their past before but ‘Unarmed’ is where it goes too far. Most songs here are completely ripped and stripped of the elements that made it appealing tracks. This ‘Unarmed’ is now more like a badly placed, failed joke than the joyful celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the world's most influential power metal bands!
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