By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

WARLOCK – HELLBOUND (1985)

The second studio album from Warlock, following their debut release Burning the Witches, raises a question right from the first time you see the cover art.

And that question is…who thought it was a good idea to release an album with a cover art photo of the band that looked like a smoke machine had run amuck?

Seriously, you can barely make out two of the guys in the photo and the smoke pervades the entire picture.

Granted, everyone knows that everything about Warlock came down to powerhouse vocalist Doro Pesch but even she is at least partially obscured by the smoke. And while she’s never been one to trade on her looks to get ahead in music, who wants to cover up the fact that besides being a great singer, she’s a smoking hot blonde German goddess?

Maybe nowadays, that’s the less politically correct thing to think, but in 1985? Come on now!

Looking up the credits online, I noticed that besides the band getting writing credits on every song, album co-producer Henry Staroste was credited as a co-writer as well. Rene Maue got three co-writing credits. The liner notes aren’t specific as to who did what, but I looked forward to the band’s True As Steel album and saw that Maue was credited as co-writing lyrics so perhaps that was their role here as well.

Anyway, that’s a look at the behind the scenes credits. Let’s turn our focus to the music now. I’m a HUGE fan of Doro Pesch and Warlock. I have been since the Warlock album Triumph and Agony. I loved seeing her perform that whole album when I FINALLY saw her live for the first time in 2017. And seeing her again a couple years later where I got to meet her (my pic with her is my profile pic on my Facebook page). But when I first discovered the band and learned about their earlier albums, I was able to track down copies of them on cassette and here we are forty years later and I am going to write about this particular release.

The album opens with the title track and I’m not sure if the live crowd that you can hear in the opening part of the track is real or an addition in the studio. But you can’t deny the fast and furious nature of the song and how it carries you along through the length of the song.

I should point out that while I do love the production sound of the album, you can clearly see how the much rawer sound of these early days would later give way to the more polished sound you get as the band’s career would progress, then end and would continue on with Doro’s solo career.

With Doro’s vocals exploding forth from your speakers and the drums from Michael Eurich forming a pounding foundation that allows Rudy Graf and Peter Szigeti to perform a solid six string duo attack over the rest of the soundtrack, “Hellbound” gets the album off to a pretty solid start.

The song “All Night” follows next and it is a track that has a different tone and tempo to it. There’s a much more mid-tempo design to the music, so you get a slow ride across the musical landscape as compared to “Hellbound”. I like the slightly more dramatic tone that the music invokes in the song.

One of the things I like to hear when I go back and listen to these earlier Warlock albums is how I can hear the way Doro’s voice started and progressed to the point where she is now after a successful four decade career that is still going on. She has an incredible scream ability here but it always is done in an under control way, if that makes sense.

The faster pace returns on “Earthshaker Rock”, which features the title words in the chorus giving the song an anthemic feel that also comes through in the full song lyrics. This is a song that you have to pump your fists into the air if you hear it.

For “Wrathchild” (not the Iron Maiden song), you get a pretty cool sounding guitar line in the song’s intro and then a full uptempo (although not as blazingly fast at the start as other songs on the album) kicks in. As the song hits the midpoint, the pacing kicks up as it heads into the guitar solo and then is pretty much a full on explosive rocker until the song ends with a brief reprise of the same guitar line that was in the intro.

The first side of the album closes out with the song “Down and Out”, which briefly features Michael Eurich behind the drum kit before the guitars come in and you get a solid thumping intro before the song settles into more of a groove rocker. But what makes this song pretty cool is how you can hear the progression from that groove in the very early going to it blooming into a far faster rocker for the chorus. Doro’s vocals are intense here. The tempo alternates back and forth from main lyrical passages to the chorus and that makes the overall listening experience pretty cool.

Side Two of Hellbound opens with the song “Out of Control”. Which is a bit funny considering the rather, dare I say, gentle way that the song opens. That brief intro almost immediately gives way to a furious sonic attack that better resembles the song’s title. And man, I love this freaking song! I can’t say for sure but “Out of Control” might just be the song that sounds most like how Warlock would sound on the Triumph and Agony album.

There’s no soft-pedalling going on for “Time To Die”. Right from the first notes, Warlock is on fire throughout the track. Eurich’s drumming plays a huge role on this song and I love the way Doro is just attacking the vocals here. There’s the rapid fire delivery of the main lyrics and then she adds in some kind of unearthly scream at points in the song for added emphasis. It all works so well. The frantic and frenzied delivery of the solo in this song catches your ear as well.

I love the riff that kicks off “Shout It Out”. It sets the tone with a sense of urgency before a small scream from Doro and the full musical score kicks in fully. It’s an uptempo number but like “Wrathchild” isn’t quite as blitzing as other songs on the album at the start. It sure as hell gets much faster over the course of most of the latter half of the song though.

The last track on Hellbound is the song “Catch My Heart” and it is the song that would qualify as the “ballad” track. What I found most interesting at the start is how the guitar line that fuels the intro is really cool. If you’ve followed Doro’s career for any length of time, you know that despite her ability to just rock out like a BOSS, she always has at least one song that shows off the “softer” side of her vocal abilities. Of course, even here there’s little that would really make you think, “UGH! Not a damn ballad.” While the music is slow and deliberate, Doro’s performance of the song lyrics doesn’t make her sound like she’s trying to be anyone but herself. Her vocals are readily identifiable and despite the overall feel of the song, Doro still brings plenty of vocal fire as the song rambles along. And like a lot of ballads, that depth of feeling later combines with a more intense musical score over the song’s latter half, combining for quite the powerful track as the song and album fades out to its end. I will say the final strains of how the album ends is a bit weird but one small “defect” isn’t enough to ruin the track or the album for me.

I know that this early Warlock stuff was a lot rawer than what people might remember given everything that came later but I know I still enjoy a lot of what is going on with the album and as someone who is a devoted Doro Pesch fan, any material that she’s a part of is always going to hold a strong place in my music-loving heart. So while Hellbound may not be an album that will be the first one you think of when it comes to Warlock and/or Doro, it is certainly a strong release that deserves a much wider audience.

NOTE OF INTEREST: The 2011 reissue of the album contains two bonus tracks. One is a studio track from a different time period than the Hellbound album. The other is a live version of the album’s title track. The album peaked at #53 on the German album charts.