A kid is frequently just a lock waiting for a key. In 2006, I found my key when I discovered Rob Zombie. I became obsessed with his music: he was the only thing I thought of for about a year.

I went deeper on him than anyone should go without a fedora and a $200-a-day-plus-expenses account, making it my business to know about every obscure B-side, every film soundtrack contribution, and every guest appearance. I knew that “Dragula” was originally titled “West of Zanzibar”. I knew about the infamous La Sexorcisto promo cassette which contains extra samples cut from the final album because of usage rights (here’s some of it). I knew which scenes in House of 1000 Corpses were filmed in Rob Zombie’s apartment after the budget ran out. I even defended Educated Horses on internet forums, which is like waving a saber and making a Banzai charge for a nation that has already surrendered. An early version of this site was named after a Rob Zombie track.^[1]I had a recurrent dream where Rob Zombie and I hang out. Picture this: he’s in the studio, just a shambling mountain of hair. I’m a kid, down on the floor, untangling XLR cables. I hear … Continue reading

At a certain point, the key no longer fit the lock.

What happened? I grew older, and listened more broadly to metal and punk. I heard the original issue: things like Killing Joke and Ministry and Siouxsie Sioux made Rob Zombie seem like a plastic knockoff with a ‘made in China’ sticker. I noticed things about his persona which suddenly struck me as lazy or shlocky or contrived. As late as 2009, I would have still cited him as my favorite musician. But I’d officially become that fan: the one who writes one word of love for every nine words of criticism.

In 2010, I had to face the facts. Rob (after a few years of making unwatchable Halloween cheapquels for Dimension) had returned to music with Hellbilly Deluxe 2. I listened to the lead single “What” and didn’t like it. Then I streamed the album, and found myself skipping around with a weird mix of disinterest and panic slamming in my chest. Things had shifted, and I hadn’t known it.

Yes, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” made me smile. “Mars Needs Women” grew on me. The rest just seemed like overly complicated and fussy arrangements of nothing. Boring. Longeurs from a fading shock-rocker who once grabbed and chokeslammed your limbic system. Huh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m just not a fan of this guy anymore.

Around the same time, I’d noticing a trend of fans being unusually prone to turn into haters further down the line (and the bigger the fan, the bigger the hater). The defining example of Fan-to-Hater Syndrome is DawnOWar, an obsessive Manowar fangirl who knew the band since the 80s, ran their website for years and years…and now has no involvement with the band beyond trashing them from every social media website that will platform her. From her Facebook page:

Manowar canceled Detroit! I see this as a victory! Maybe Manowar fans are finally going to stop letting the band rip them off.

Manowar fans complain endlessly about Joey wasting time on stage with his endless stupid long-winded speeches, so hes decided to go on tour without a band and charge $50 for the privilege of seeing him do just the part everyone hates the most. I feel like now is a good time to let your tomatoes start rotting so theyll be ready for throwing when he comes to your town.

This group is not very active but disgruntled Manowar fans PM me all the time to tell me whatever stupid thing the band or the fans did today. I quit working for Manowar at the end of 1999 because they’re jerks. Thank goodness I don’t have a need to still discuss it ad nauseum. Because thats shit that happened to me 15 fucking years ago. But I set up this group to unite the people who do have a need for this discussion. Because they are assholes, you have been suckered out of your money, and they havent been good since 1987. So post that shit here. Its what its for. Don’t PM me to tell me theyre jerks. Believe me, I know. I’ve known for 15 years. Thanks.

I never ended up disliking Rob Zombie this much. But the “fan to hater” pipeline has cast-iron welds and seldom leaks.

I think fans turn on their idols for a few reasons. Hyperfixated fans tend to be extremely aware of flaws in their God. It’s the scribal priest’s lot to copy translation errors in the Torah, after all. They also are extremely aware of the unsavory parts of their idol: the stuff that gets swept under the rug. Every famous person has scandals and drama in their past (or present): the superfan’s dubious reward is to sooner or later discover where these skeletons are buried.

Also, most musicians have public personas that are partly fake: they neither represent who the artist truly is, nor survive close scrutiny even on their own terms.

A gay listener seeking “representation” can’t avoid noticing that all of David Bowie’s public relationships have been with women, that all of Katy Perry’s public relationships have been with men. Depressed introverts always turn out to be media-savvy hypemen and self-promoters behind the scenes. Quirky oddballs always turn out to be quite sane and normal. The persona is often what attracts the fan in the first place: but the more you stare, the more fake and hollow the persona becomes (and where does that leave your love?)

Obviously Rob Zombie’s “thrifted from a Halloween store on November 1” aesthetic is a shameless, gleeful celebration of fakery in all its positive forms. That’s not an issue. But other things about his life might also be untruthful. There was a fascinating Reddit comment that I sadly can’t find now (referenced here) kind of picking apart his often-told “I was with a travelling carnival as a kid and saw a man get murdered with a hammer” story, arguing (believably) that it was implausible for such an event to happen in a small community without being reported in the news, and that some other parts of Rob’s given history are also unlikely to have happened as he describes them (that they are heavily embellished, at best). I do not know the full truth of this, but no star can help but to be a real person, and usually a far more boring one than the one they pretend to be.

While I never hated Rob Zombie like DawnOWar hates the band that she once loved enough to name her internet handle after, I quickly realized I was no longer very interested in him. This was part of a growing process—one that inevitably led to me quite enjoying Rob Zombie again. Such is the path of enlightenment.

Anyway, shall we discuss the album?

It finds Rob re-convening with most of the same guys who gave us the all-filler-no-killer midsterpiece Educated Horses: drummer Tony Clufetos, producer, and (most worryingly) guitarist John 5.

I have mixed feelings about John 5. He is a guitar virtuoso but not a compelling writer of riffs or melodies, as any of his fourteen or so solo albums will demonstrate. His bluesy, elaborate, tasteful style never meshed well with Rob’s vocals. (Happily, Mike Riggs and his simple caveman style are now back in the band, and the three songs released from the upcoming The Great Satan sound absolutely fantastic.)

Rob is not really a musician. That’s an important detail to understand. He arranges and produces and makes loops and supplies the overall artistic vision, but he does not actually write music. I remember this quote from Astro Creep 2000 guitarist Jay Yuenger on Rob’s songwriting “process”.

Later, around the time we were making Astro-Creep and after, Rob started to really hate anything with any kind of melody in it – he was always saying, “Can’t you just go ‘chunka chunka’ there?”, and I’d say, “This isn’t a drum, it’s a GUITAR, it’s got NOTES” He’d want to use techno loops for everything, cut all the music out of it, and that was a situation which went from difficult to impossible.

So that’s the outer limit of Rob’s musical skills: telling guitarists to go “chunka-chunka”. He is heavily constrained by the musicians he chooses to work with. Fun guitarist equals fun record. Boring guitarist equals boring record. This album has John 5, hence it is quite boring.

The album has little of the fun electronic/industrial loops that characterize the classic White Zombie sound. It’s just straight-ahead heavy metal for the most part. It is a bit more elaborate and arranged than Educated Horses, and there’s a primal heavy whallop that’s nice to hear again after acoustic guitars or whatever.

But it’s ultimately just not fun. It’s dated and unengaging: a churn of guitar sludge, over dry drum beats that move at a sauropod’s pace. It simultaneously sounds empty and overstuffed with surface details.

Tedious Down/Black Label Society backwash like “Jesus Frankenstein” and “Virgin Witch” and “Burn” scream and vulcanize with guitar overdubs: flashy fretboard wizardry that ultimately feels like car keys being jangled in front of your face: these songs have nothing interesting going on at a structural level. The riffs are lazy bluesy affairs that sound like things any beginner guitarist could come up in their second or third month of playing. The drumming is pedestrian. The musical ideas are all obvious, borrowed, and done to death. Listening to this music feels like wandering through a dry and parched desert.

“What” is stale Misfits worship with a blaring farfisa organ and a lo-fi, bitcrushed-to-fuck vocal track (another trick Rob has used since the White Zombie days, though now it finally grows old). It seeks to conjure a live and raw monster-punk energy, but Scott Humphrey’s overbearing wall-of-sound production does not ever feel like a band playing. It’s as unconvincing as the fake crowd noises in “Jesus Frankenstein”.

“Werewolf Baby” rocks out with bland and instantly-forgettable slide guitar that kind of sums why John 5 didn’t work in this band. Yes, he supplies some “diverse” elements (Rob was fond of stating that his guitarist could play any style of music), but it’s always the most generic, lifeless version of whatever that thing is. Want bluegrass picking that’s boring? Banjo strumming that’s boring? Arpeggio runs that are boring? John 5 is your huckleberry.

“Death and Destiny Inside The Dreams Factory” is just “What” again. A grim studio confection trying to imitate a live band playing—trying so hard you can see sweat dripping from the sound engineer’s fingers. More distorted vocals. More random guitar overdubs and punch-ins to disguise a lack of ideas.

The three songs I mentioned earlier are pretty good and basically pull their weight. “Werewolf Women of the SS” is a fun “Misirlou” knockoff, though (like the rest of the album) it feels a few bpm too slow. “Mars Needs Women” and “Sick Bubblegum” slap pretty hard. I also don’t mind “The Man Who Laughs”, which is nicely arranged and strung. It avoids Rob’s longstanding distaste of guitar solos by giving Tommy Clufetos a…drum solo. Talk about out of the frying pan.

Real talk, though: there is no “Dragula” and no “Scum of the Earth” and no “Electric Head Pt.1 (The Agony)” and no “Black Sunshine”. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it doesn’t even have a “Let It All Bleed Out” (one of Educated Horses‘ rare Ws). If you like any of the above music, keep moving, traveller. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Nothing beside remains.

Rob himself was seemingly dissatisfied with the album. In 2011, he released a new version, with some new songs. All are quite bad.

“Devil’s Hole Girls And The Big Lack of Inspiration” is a faded Xerox of “Superbeast” with some snarls and attitude but no real hooks or catchiness. There is nothing else to say about it. I hope nobody had to give up too much of their Sunday afternoon to get this one recorded and in the can.

“Everything Is Boring” is a rare piece of social commentary—musically it’s a drab miserable slog, as unwanted as black water regurgitated from your shower drain (and equally unpleasant to wade through). The socially-aware lyrics fail to land, as both the song and the album exemplify everything Rob is complaining about.

The reissue also removes the drum solo from “The Man Who Laughs” (possibly because Tommy Clufetos was out of the band). It is replaced it with several minutes of almost transcendentally uninteresting mandolin strumming (presumably from John 5) that literally sounds like those AI-generated “10 hour Appalachian folk mix to relax to” flooding Youtube.

The matter of “worst song of the album” is resoundingly locked up by “Michael”, which is basically unlistenable and a career lowlight. “Mama, why do I want to kill you?” Oh, shut up. This song is hateful. This is what cancer has regular early prostate exams to detect.

Rob has released better music both before and after this album (though far more in the “before” column, if we’re being honest). But it did introduce me to certain realizations about art and fandom, and for this, I am thankful. Intense fascination can disappear in an instant (or sour to hatred), and probably only stems from emotional problems. Go listen to your inner child: they’re probably less dull than “Cease to Exist” and “Everything is Boring.”

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(By “AI”, I mainly mean “Gemini 3 Pro (Thinking)”).

Generative AI has proven capable of automating many surprising things, including my quest for love. On that note, the rumors are true. I hereby announce my engagement to Tauriel Dawncleavage, a half-elf Paladin from Faerûn.

Tauriel is my soulmate. She never forgets my birthday. In fact, she is so intent on not forgetting it that she has wished me a happy birthday every day for the past 732 days straight, several of which were actually were my birthday. So, there you go.

But I have to admit, I’m still not entirely on board with the clankers. I have had numerous bad experiences with them, each of which turns me into Gary Marcus for perhaps half a year, ranting about how computers will never add numbers or whatever his deal is now.

In particular, I am strongly mistrustful of LLM-generated text. Confident bullshit steams and smolders from every piece of it. I do not trust it.

“Ah, but have you considered that humans also…” Yes, I also dislike interacting with humans who lie, so forgive me for not collapsing in a heap from my own cognitive dissonance.

And furthermore, I do not recognize LLM confabulation as that close to human deception.

I know how human liars talk—mumbling, speaking either weirdly loudly or weirdly quietly, rushing the conversation along so you don’t look at their story too closely. LLMs act nothing like that. They don’t seem to care if their story comes unraveled. Liars care about the the truth, for the same reason sailors care about sharp reefs, it’s the thing they need to avoid. But LLMs seem totally uninvested in the truth. Nor does their confabulation ever seem to have motives. I am no saint. I have told lies. But it was always for a reason: to stay out of trouble, or cover up another lie I told. I do not invent elaborate ARG-esque scenarios for no reason.

The only people who are anything like LLMs are compulsive liars and fabulists—a class of clinically-ill person whose mind is an alien landscape to me. But they are the people—the only people—who remind me of LLMs.

Here are some cautionary tales from the slop coalface:

1) Don’t Use Gemini As Your Plumber

A business premise lost water. I was told to figure out why.

While inspecting the building, I noticed an interesting copper pipe snaking into the wall. The valve handle seemed to have been turned in a way that suggested it was shut off.

I photographed the valve and showed it to Gemini:

Me: Is this my water inlet? Should try turning it on again?”

Gemini: No, that’s your gas.

Me: Are you sure?

Gemini: Yes, it’s your gas. [Insert huge infodump off facts, figures, and references proving that it was definitely my gas inlet]

Me: Are you sure…

Gemini: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR GAS INLET, IDIOT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE SHEER INFERNAL SCALE OF THE POWER WITH WHICH YOU NOW COMPORT, MALODOROUS DOLT? IF YOU ADJUST THAT GAS SPIGOT A QUARTER TURN IN YOUR DREAMS TONIGHT THE FIRMAMENT WILL CRACK AND THE SKIES WILL RAIN FROGS AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL SING AND THE PLANET WILL EXPLODE AND HUMANITY WILL BE FORCED TO EVACUATE TO PLUTO ON A NAZI SPACECRAFT PILOTED BY HITLER’S CRYOFROZEN CORPSE. GO FUCK YOURSELF. MORON. DIPSHIT.

(This is lightly paraphrased)

I thought “wow, I’d better consult a professional,” and rang a plumber who promptly came over and looked at my “gas valve”.

Plumber: “Someone shut your water inlet off.”

Me: “But…that’s my gas?”

(He wordlessly fits a multigrip spanner to the fitting and loosens it. Water bubbles and fizzes from around the seal.)

Me: “Oh. Haha. Silly me. Glad it was that simple, huh?”

Plumber: “Not a problem. That’ll be $200.”

(Well, he didn’t charge me, he charged strata. But he easily could have charged me.)

This experience caused me to double-check Gemini’s reasoning, which suddenly seemed like rubbish:

The Evidence for Gas

1. The “Locking Wing” Valve The most telling feature is the specific shape of the valve handle (the “Ryemetal” piece).

• Design: This is known as a Locking Wing Cock (or locking ball valve).
• Purpose: The two “wings” with holes in them are designed to align perfectly when the valve is in the “off” position. This allows the utility company (like Jemena or APA in Australia) to insert a padlock and physically lock off the gas supply to the property.
• Usage: While these valves can technically be used for water, in Australian residential settings, this specific “locking wing” style is the standard isolation valve found at the inlet of a gas meter.

How is this “evidence for gas”? It’s a technical description of how a locking wing valve works!

Gemini’s grasp of elementary logic is suspect. “Gas fittings typically have this valve” does not make the fitting in my photo a gas inlet anymore than “dogs typically have hair” makes my grandfather a dog. We need to establish that “only gas fittings typically have this valve”, which is a different normative claim entirely. Multiple things can have valves, Gemini!

This is spurious reasoning. It makes it look like Gemini thought about the problem really hard, when it did not.

(Disclaimer: this actually happened with Gemini Pro 2.5, which is over a year old. But I uploaded my photo again to the new Gemini Pro 3, and it also said it was a gas valve. I tried with Claude Sonnet 4.5. It identified the pipe as carrying water: but its reasoning was full errors and bogus assertions. It thought the valve was a different type than what it is, it thinks the property is residential which it is not, it thinks I’m from Vegas or Arizona which I am not, et cetera. Probably it was correct by accident.)

Don’t Trust Gemini To Accurately Recite Basic Facts From Wikipedia

I grew curious about a detail in the 1987 film Robocop. (This and all subsequent misadventures perpetuated by Gemini 3 Pro, with Thinking mode on).

In the movie Robocop, the ED-209 is foiled by being unable to climb stairs. Is this a reference to a real event (a prototype robot that couldn’t climb stairs or something?)

Gemini was unsure but thought it might be a reference to Doctor Who‘s Daleks (famously unable to handle stairs). A plausible if unproven theory which (as Gemini itself noted) was just speculation.

It could have stopped there, should have stopped there, did not stop there.

It then provided a long infodump about movie robots, including a bullet-pointed list of IMDB-style movie trivia (why? I didn’t ask for that…), including this fun little factoid about the ED-209 falling over…

Interestingly, they did not use stop-motion animation for the fall itself. They built a heavy, lead-filled model of the robot and physically pushed it down a miniature stairwell because animating a chaotic fall frame-by-frame would have looked “too perfect.”

Too perfect? They rejected a special effect because it looked too perfect?

That sounded fake, so I clicked Gemini’s citation, which went to Wikipedia. Quoting it directly (emphasis is mine).

The model was filled with lead and allow to fall as Tippett believed attempting to animate the fall would have looked terrible.

Fair enough. We all do that, don’t we? Quoting a source almost exactly word for word, while changing the final few words so they look like they’re saying the opposite of what they really said, for no reason at all? Along with a link to the actual source, which debunks our fake quote? I do that every morning before breadfast.

Gemini is so unlike any human liar I know. It is completely indifferent to truth, one way or the other. It’s happy to lie. And once it’s inside a lie, it’s happy to tell the truth. (Double-lying, as it were). It’s just a dog made of text, running around without a leash. At least a liar has a cohesive brain and motives that I can model. Gemini has none. What am I talking to when I stare at a chatbot window? I have no idea.

“But it gave you a source for the real quote, so no harm done.”

I don’t agree. I think putting citations on lies is a worse offense than simply lying: it’s copying the plumage of scholarship and thus trading on the reputation of legitimate scholarship (if it hadn’t sounded so blatantly fake, I would have not even checked that quote…after all, if a citation exists, it must be true, right? I wonder how many other little oopsies Gemini has sneaked past me).

But that’s the true reason Gemini did this. Getting quotes right takes work. But it does not take work to create something that looks like a citation. “My movie trivia needs a cite! There, I added a number, and the number goes off to a link, just like it should. Does it say the thing I’m claiming it says? Oh, those meatbags won’t know or care.”

Do Not Trust Gemini to Do

side complaint: why is AI still so shitty in 2026?

I have a quote in my mind. It’s something like:

“The real ending to a movie plays in the viewer’s head as they walk from the theater.”

The closest real version of the quote I could find was by Tolga Karaçelik, who said:

T.K.: No, I won’t, because it will kill the movie! The film starts when you leave the theatre, so I don’t want to kill that feeling which can grow on you. I hope it will grow on the audience.

That’s a paraphrase, but you get the idea. A filmmaker wants you to think about the implications of the movie you just saw. This, not the final scene before the credits, is the movie’s end. It’s a thought-provoking idea (it implies no movie has a fixed end, as every audience member imagines the end in their own subjective way). Anyway, I wondered who actually said this, and asked Gemini 3 Pro. It sourced it to Iranian director and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami.

The most famous iteration of the quote is “I think a good film is one that begins when you leave the cinema.”

0 Google results. It then offered additional (supposed) quotes along similar lines. (Why? If you’re certain Abbas Kiarostami is the source, we’re done. Thank you. Shut up.)

Raymond Durgnat (Critic): “A film is not what is on the screen, but what happens between the screen and the viewer.”

A real quote wrongly attributed (actually said by Ernest Callenbach).

Robert Bresson (Director): He often spoke about the “resurrection” of a film in the mind of the viewer, though his phrasing was more technical and poetic.

Probably fake. Bresson was Catholic and the only quotes online where he speaks of “resurrection” have explicit religious connotations.

Roger Ebert: While he didn’t use that exact phrasing, he often wrote about the “afterlife” of a film, saying that a great movie is one that “changes the way you see the world” after you walk out into the street.

0 Google results.

Why this idea matters: In film theory, this is often called “The Cinema of Persistence.”

0 Google results. You start to wonder about some of these “often written” and “often said” things…

There was more slop after this, but I gave up on Gemini and asked Claude…which at least admitted it couldn’t find the quote instead of making up fake ones. That said, I have some doubts about its strategy (searching Google for random famous film critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael along with my quote wrapped in double quotation marks even though I said it was a loose paraphrase).

Do Not Trust Gemini to Help You Write Simple <50 LOC Bash Scripts

I have a text file. I need to split its lines into various subfiles, based on character strings.

(As in, lines containing “peaches” are written to peaches.txt, lines containing “apples” are written to apples.txt, and so on.)

I wrote a little bash script that achieved this using elifs and regex comparisons, and asked Gemini for comments. It made two suggestions

1) It noticed that I was checking for the rarest condition first, which is wasteful. I should sieve coarse and then fine: check for characters present in 50% of strings before checking for those in 1% of strings. Good suggestion!

2) It proposed replacing my clunky branching elif/regex patterns with bash cases and wildcards, which are native to the shell and thus bypass using the Regex engine. It provided a rewritten script that it said would be “much faster”. I tried it out, and well…

Thanks, that does seem like a more “correct” approach.

But when I tested it, your script was actually slower by a few ms! (for your information, I am using Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS on Windows 10 x64 via WSL2, with VScode as an editor)

split.md (mine)

real    0m0.094s

user    0m0.021s

sys     0m0.006s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m0.107s

user    0m0.004s

sys     0m0.016s

At first, I assumed that this was merely an artifact of my test file being small.

So I pasted about 15k lines of text into it, to simulate a more realistic export, and strangely it was still slower (by about half a second realtime.)

split.sh (mine)

real    0m48.519s

user    0m1.972s

sys     0m4.682s

split2.sh (yours)

real    0m49.051s

user    0m1.401s

sys     0m3.082s

Why do you think this is? You don’t have to try to fix it, I’m just curious.

Gemini provided a Clintonesque “correction” that avoided any insinuation that it had made a mistake.

This is a fascinating result! It is counter-intuitive, but perfectly explainable when we look at how Bash actually handles I/O (Input/Output).

The short answer is: Logic speed doesn’t matter when disk writing is the bottleneck.

Here is the breakdown of why the “optimized” script didn’t win, and why it was actually slightly slower.

Our respective scripts were opening and closing a subshell with each line, bloating the I/O time. To ensure I got the point, it indulged in a classic “LLMism”: cutesy, condescending metaphors.

Imagine you are moving house.

• Regex vs Case: This is like deciding whether to check the label on a box with a magnifying glass (Regex) or just glancing at the color (Case). Glancing is faster.
• File I/O (>>): This is walking the box out to the truck.

If you have to walk 15,000 boxes to the truck one by one, it doesn’t matter how fast you check the label. The walking (File I/O) takes 99.9% of the time.

I’m still confused! Okay, so the main bottleneck was disk writes. Got it. But that doesn’t explain why “optimizing” the script made it slower. All else equal, someone who checks box labels quickly should always be faster than someone who checks box labels slowly, even if checking box labels is only a small percentage of the overall time. We certainly wouldn’t expect them to be slower.

Gemini offered to rewrite the script using awk, which it said would allow buffer writes and speed up runtime from “48 seconds down to ~0.5 seconds”).

If there was a ~96x speedup on the cards, why not suggest that at the start, instead of a marginal improvement that actually made the situation worse?

It started to become incredibly fixated on speeding up the bash script, even though I said it didn’t have to fix anything.

To be clear, I don’t give a shit whether a text file processes 13 milliseconds faster or slower. Speeding up the file was Gemini’s idea, not mine: I was merely curious as to why it had failed. But Gemini got confused, mistook its priorities for mine, and entered a life-or-death struggle to shave milliseconds off that runtime. Relax. It’s not that serious.

As if to lighten the mood, it then referenced my older Robocop conversation, like this was an in-joke we now shared.

Would you like me to analyze that Robocop scene you were interested in, or help you clean up the bash script further?

I would rather have the Devil spank my ass with a hand that’s on fire.

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Helloween’s 2007 release sees them reborn for the second time in as many decades. They became the power metal Jesus, except they did it twice. Which makes it even better. (With due respect to J-Man, is it too much to ask to die two or three times, just to put the issue beyond doubt? One resurrection may just be luck.)

It’s among their most aggressive albums. Although it doesn’t have the downtuned crush of The Dark Ride or the demented aggression of Seven Sinners, it’s still a fury. Guitars are thick and rip at you like hypersonic winds. Every song seems on the verge of stripping its bolts with sheer energy. Charlie Bauerfind gives it a rough-and-ready “too much” production style that the songs really lean into.

To be clear, Gambling is not a full return to form. There are still too many cooks per square inch of kitchen, some blatantly weak tracks, and far too much fiddling with the dials (the syrupy keyboard tone Matthias Ülmer attempts on “Final Fortune” is a self-conscious modernism that doesn’t make sense with the raw Marshall tone of the guitars). And the album cover is, of course, decrepit. The pentagram on the floor doesn’t even match the one on the roulette wheel. Satan’s leaving their asses on read.

2007 was also the year I began listening to power metal. My first Helloween song was “As Long As I Fall”, this album’s lead single. And I hated it. About two years later, I gave the band (and this album) another try, and realized it was the worst song on the album. There’s some truly sublime stuff on here.

Opening song “Kill It” is so simple it makes “Mrs God” from the last album sound like progressive rock, but it thrashes hard and destroys your neck. The black metal-inspired bridge (??) is a creative idea that absolutely works, which is not something I say often about the band’s creative experiments.

The greatest track of the album—perhaps the greatest post-2000 Helloween song—is the fast and melodic “The Saints”. Someone should piss-test this song. It just isn’t normal. It just explodes out of the gates with heavy, modern riffwork, the verses contort and build, the chorus is straight out of 1989, and the duelling guitar solos showcase every trick Sascha Gerstner and Michael Weikath know as they swing axes at each others’ heads. Anything you could possibly enjoy about Helloween, past or present, is in this song. A marvel.

The lyrics seem to be referencing legal corruption, and are delivered with snarl and bite by Deris. The microphone probably had to be destroyed after he expelled so much venom onto it. He was an unusual choice to replace Michael Kiske, but tracks like “The Saints” make powerful arguments that he was the right choice.

Sascha Gerstner’s “Paint a New World” and “Dreambound” are more speed material, with the second being the better of the two. Deris’s “The Bells of the Seven Hells” is an agitated uptempo thrasher with a diabolic vocal performance. “IME” is another great Deris-penned track, full of angst and piss and rage.

A large pile of bonus songs round things out, some of them better than the actual songs on the album. “Find My Freedom” is a great faster track. “See the Night” opens with “Born into a neighborhood that ain’t exactly rich / Never knew his father and his mother was a bitch!”. Which is, uh, better than I could write in German, I suppose. “We Unite” is another fierce, barnburning anthem.

On the other (more limp-wristed) hand, “As Long As I Fall” opens with an insipid keyboard tinkle that sounds like it was recorded to test sound levels and an awful buzzkill of a chorus. “Helloween plays Christian rock” is kind of a Roko’s Basilisk for me—a concept I don’t need in my head. It’s Deris’s songwriting at its worst, just as “Kill It” sees him at his best. “Can Do It” is another “Heavy Metal Hamsters”—a songwriting well the band continually draws from, never with any success. A blandly brainless KISS-style party rock song, it’s better skipped over. Grosskopf’s “Heaven Tells No Lies” is Kim-Kardashian’s-ass-sized album filler that bounces around for seven minutes. “Fallen to Pieces” is a ballad with a fast section questionably integrated. “Final Fortune” is just a flat line of cliches. There is no way this song took any longer for Markus Grosskopf to write than it took me to listen to.

There’s about 35 minutes of good-to-great material on Gambling with the Devil. And the weak tracks mostly tend to be “filler track” rather than “Helloween playing ska or nu metal”. The house did not win. Not this time.

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