This May sees the return of Power / Thrash Metal legends HELSTAR to Europe on their European leg of This Wicked Tour. As an added bonus, this was also a great opportunity for fans of the band's older work to witness the live performance of almost the entirety of their debut album "Burning Star" in celebration of its 30^th anniversary. When I first arrived, nerves were high as HELSTAR had been delayed in Switzerland, but luckily they arrived towards the end of the opening band's set. Unfortunately the venue was only filled to about half of its capacity, although given that it was a gloomy, cold, and rainy Monday night, this wasn't entirely unexpected. But such small audiences usually consist of the real die-hard fans anyway, proving once more that quality is better than quantity.

Starting off the night was RED TO GREY, a German Power / Thrash Metal band. Fronted by a small woman with a big voice and a huge range, what was outstanding about this band was the passion and energy that they put into their music. The drummer and vocalist in particular were never still for a second, instead being in a constant state of motion; a stark contrast to the bassist, who was confined to a stool due to a recent leg injury. Keeping the audience engaged with jocular commentary, which was unfailingly followed by a little drum roll, RED TO GREY's thundering set had heads nodding along. Ending off with "Fall of God", one of the most energetic songs of their performance, they certainly had the crowd pumped and ready for NATOR.

Setlist:
1. Intro
2. In The Darkest Corner
3. Human Barbecue
4. Fight
5. Trigger of Lies
6. Sweet Suffering
7. Armor Piercing Dread
8. The Dead Walk
9. Phantom
10. Moralizer
11. Fall of God

I unfortunately missed the first half of NATOR's performance, as I was upstairs interviewing HELSTAR; however, even from upstairs, soul-searing guitar solos and wildly blasting drum beats came floating up to where we sat. And if this wasn't motivation enough to want to catch the rest of their set, HELSTAR's frontman James Rivera commented to his band mates that NATOR was really good, encouraging them to check out the band. And so with this stamp of approval and accordingly high expectations, I headed downstairs to watch the second half of NATOR's relentless set. And I must say, they did put on a very good show! The guitarists in particular looked as if they were having the time of their lives up on that stage. This German Heavy Metal/Power founded in 1999, the majority of the setlist was drawn from their 2008 debut album "Evil or Divine". With calls for an encore at the end of their performance, NATOR clearly left a considerable impression on the crowd.

Setlist:
1. Intro/Fate of the Phoenix
2. Soldiers of Fortune
3. Exploitation
4. Signs in the Autumn's Mist
5. Warlords
6. Into Eternal Sunset
7. Heaven's Gate is Sealed
8. Sorrows

Finally it was time for the headliners of the show, the legendary HELSTAR. With vocalist James appearing on stage wearing the infamous Skully, the skeletal mask with great bull-horns protruding from it, HELSTAR immediately launched straight into their relentless and thunderous set. Fans went particularly wild to anthems such as "Evil Reign" off of the 1986 album "Remnants of War", which had almost everyone singing along, miserably failing at hitting the high notes so effortlessly hit by James.

Fans of the older HELSTAR albums had a big surprise waiting for them: a full six songs off of the "Burning Star" album as the encore. After having said goodnight after the end of their main set, HELSTAR barely managed to make it off the stage before the vociferous cries for more besieged the stage. Picking up his guitar, Larry regaled the audience with the account of how James wished to play the majority of the "Burning Star" album on the tour due to it being the debut's 30 year anniversary, and how Larry had thought that no-one would want to hear these old songs again, but that he had been proven very wrong thus far on the tour. And Munich showed him that they were no exception: headbanging, air-guitaring along to the solos, and rowdy attempts at singing along were the order of the night. Overall, it was an amazing night of pure metal madness that will undoubtedly be remembered for some time to come.

Setlist:
1. Evil Reign
2. This Wicked Nest
3. It Has Risen
4. The King of Hell
5. Burning Star
6. Toward the Unknown
7. Witch's Eye
8. Dracula's Castle
9. Shadows of Iga
10. Run With the Pack

With HELSTAR on their recent tour of Europe to showcase their newly released album "This Wicked Nest", I got the opportunity to speak to James, Larry, and Rob, the vocalist and guitarists respectively, and we covered topics ranging from their tour to their new album to HELSTAR's advice for any young bands out there.

So how have you been? I heard you had troubles at the border today?

James: It wasn't even at the border; it was actually in the parking lot of the hotel! The problem was when you go into Switzerland, you're supposed to declare your merchandise before you even go in, and then you have to pay some tax on it. And then when we got there, he asked a few questions, but he didn't really press the issue. Larry had to get his passport out of the back and clear as day there are boxes and boxes and boxes of shit, you'd think he would have said "Woah, what is that?", and he didn't. So we went and we did the gig, we went back to the hotel, we had a late check-out. So right as we're checking out of the hotel and getting ready to load the van up again with our suitcases and stuff, this undercover border patrol guy was in another little car and started asking all these questions, and then he made us open the back, and said "What's in all those boxes over there?", so we tell him it's band merchandise, and he goes "Ah, let's pull that out!". So they did all that in the parking lot of the hotel, then they called in another squad car, and then they came, and they had to count all the shit, they had to take it all out, unload everything, and count every little piece. And then they asked how much merch we sold, and so we told them the truth. But now that I think about it, we could have told them we only sold about 200 francs worth of shit. But I was thinking we're already in trouble, let's just keep everything the way it is. What scared us was how did he come right at that time? So we think somebody tipped them off. He was just ironically just driving through the parking lot of a hotel to bust a band that might have some merchandise on them? So anyway, that's the story.

Other than that mishap, how has the tour been so far?

James: It's been great, other than that. That's been the only problem we've had. It could have been worse, they could have really been dicks and detained us or who knows what.

And of the four shows still coming up, are there any you're particularly looking forward to?

James: Well, all of them, but I think that Barcelona has a special place in our hearts, since it is our heritage from many years ago and I've played there many times with different things, but HELSTAR has never played Spain ever, so it's our first time.

You're touring for partly for the release of your new album "The Wicked Nest", but you're also celebrating the 30 year anniversary of the debut album "Burning Star". How has it been revisiting the debut after so much time?

James: People are loving it. It seems that a lot of them are coming for that reason; it's at the end of the night when they really go crazy!

Looking back at "Burning Star", and given your progression as a band, is there anything you would have changed about it if you could?

James: Well, I think at the time, we wouldn't have been able to do anything differently. It was the time period for what it was. Bands that are influencing us now weren't around. It would be impossible to go "Oh, if we could go back, we could probably do this". What we're doing now, we wouldn't know it; we wouldn't even know it existed.

Rob: The only thing would have been the production.

James: Yeah, the production. We probably could have tweaked that a little better.

And how has the reaction been so far to "The Wicked Nest"?

Larry: I think it's been positive. Sometimes we'll play something, and you can tell that people just don't know the music because it just came out a week ago or so. They're like "Ah, that was cool... I'd better clap!". There's a bit of a delayed reaction; they don't know when the songs are going to end, and when they end, they're caught off-guard. But for the most part, the people that have heard it seem to like it. I've gotten a lot of good comments from fans and stuff. I'm happy with it. I guess that's kind of the bottom line: if we all feel strongly about it and happy with it, then... We're our own worst critics, just like many other bands.

What can fans expect from the new album?

Larry: I guess it's a better blend of the old style and what we started doing on the "Glory of Chaos", where it's still very thrashy, but there are parts that have these little intricate passages. I think a lot of fans miss that. They wanted to hear a little more of the progressive or old style that HELSTAR had. This was not anything we intended to do, but when we wrote the music, it just came out that way. But it's good to know that that made them happy. I hate to say that we'll try to do that, but we won't shy away from it either if we're writing music and it comes out that way. I think now we're finding a good spot for ourselves, and what we're doing is pretty unique. You don't have Thrash bands with a singer like James. It's really different to have a singer, and I think that puts us in a different category; more original than some of the other bands.

What was the inspiration behind the album?

James: Its funny, because the song writing came first but as the songs were written lyrically, as Larry was passing me a lot of his work, and as I was ironically writing along those same lines, sometimes the inspiration comes later. So it's not like there was something that inspired the record, it wasn't really a concept with the majority of the album being about this. We did it backwards, but once it's done, then the title was inspired by what we had done.

Larry: There's a lot of political themes underlying the songs, and that was, like James says, we watch the news and get influenced by that. You start writing about it, and there's a few songs that aren't political, but James tied in a lot of his songs very nicely where you will hear him say something about "the nest" throughout the lyrics.

James: What inspired me on this theme was that I actually got to witness the rioting in Istanbul as it was happening. I was there because of a delayed flight and I have a bunch of friends, so I was there during the whole gas bombings and everything. It really made me go "Wow, I'm far away from home!" You hear about this shit on the news, but being right in the middle of it while you're having dinner and seeing soldiers run by and people with masks, it was bizarre! It wasn't a comfortable feeling.

Larry: I'm gonna take you way back. When we started talking about doing the album, lyrically we thought "Why don't we do a bunch of songs about Mexican horror stories that we grew up with?" So we started off, well, there's this story, there's that story, but then after a while it just seemed so hard to do, so we abandoned that. The only thing that came out of that was the title for the instrumental one, "Isla de las Muñecas".

James: The Island of the Dolls. It really does exist somewhere. That's got to be a creepy thing! I don't know what's more creepy: people with gas masks or dolls hanging from trees.

Yeah, I heard urban legend has it that a girl drowned there.

Larry: She drowned there, and now people come and to appease her spirit, they leave dolls. And they just hang them up in the trees, and they become weathered and very scary looking. They say at night the dolls whisper to each other! Somebody did a show on it. I liked the title, and I liked the story. James ironically said we should do an instrumental, and when I started writing it, I said I'm going to call it that, because I like that title.

James: It was also the first story that Larry brought to me, so it's also the strongest, because there are other Mexican folklore stories, but that one just had a cool title to it.

Speaking about titles, what made you decide to call the new album "The Wicked Nest"?

James: Well, it was a combination of things. Remember that I'm scarred from Istanbul, and now I'm seeing in the news that there was crap going on in Syria at the time and all the innocent people were getting gases and all that, and this reporter was on the news, and he said "It's unbelievable how these people are trying so hard to escape this nest of wickedness" and "This nest of wickedness" stuck, and I was like "Wow, that's heavy!". So when we started talking about the title I passed it around, and everybody liked it. But then Larry analysed it a little more, and what he said made sense, it was just the two little letters "of": "Remnants OF War", "King OF Hell", "Glory OF Chaos", "Thirty Years OF Hell". I guess it didn't bother me that much, but the more he brought it up, the more it became like an itch. So he sat on it for a day, then he sent the title to everybody the next day. We get rid of the "of", sounds like a winner to me!

And does the concept of death play a role in the album?

James: Yes and no. There are two songs that are indirectly pertaining to death, either waiting for death, or a person who has gone to the other side of death and has come back. But those were separate from the whole thing.

Larry: "Eternal Black" is death personified. I'm a big fan on American Horror Story, and it was the second season, Asylum, one of the characters in it is this lady in black and she was actually death, and she would walk up to the bed or wherever the person was, and she'd say "Are you ready?", and then they would say yes, and she would kiss them and they would die. And I thought it was really cool how they personified death, so I just took it from there and wrote the lyrics that way. Nothing really deep, but it's a cool show, so I wrote about that.

How does the album writing process usually go?

Rob: Usually the way it starts out is Larry and I will have ideas that we will bounce back and forth, and we have home studios, so we demo them out and we send them to Mikey, and then Mikey will come back like "What does this sound like?" and then sometimes it's like "Yeah, that's it!" and sometimes it's like "Well, you know Mikey, I was thinking of a more one-two beat there". But it's not like we're writing his parts, it's like he's throwing in ideas, and when it clicks with us, from what we were thinking musically, then we say "Yeah, that's it!". And that's kind of how it works. Melody-wise, Larry has a lot of that stuff he wants to do cadence-wise, and he gets with James on that.

Larry: And we're all sort of producers. My pet peeve is splitting words, like "beyond". I don't want to hear "be...yond", I want to hear "beeeeyooooond", I want to hear the word together. That's my pet peeve, so when we're in the studio, I'm like "Urgh, you split that word man!" So then James will go back and do it again. And Rob has his, like when I do a solo, he will say "Man, you played those notes pretty close to each other". It doesn't bother me, but I know it bothers him, so I'll go back and do it again. It makes a difference in the end when you have everyone bouncing ideas off each other.

One final question: With 32 years of experience, you've obviously learnt a lot. Seeing as a lot of young bands look up to you, would you have any advice for them?

Larry: If there's a young band, coming out of high school, going into college, you can do both! You can do music and you can go to school. You can and you should. Rob and I talk about that all the time. We could have done it, there was plenty of time to, we weren't touring year round when we were young, we wasted a lot of time.

James: Especially now you can do it online.

Larry: If you're playing metal, man, those days of being a METALLICA or a MAIDEN or PRIEST, they're over. I don't know of any band that's going to reach that arena status any more. I don't know if it's just because there's just so much competition and it's oversaturated or what, but I would love for it to happen again, but I don't see it happening. And for a young band to think "We're going to be the next METALLICA" man, that's a huge mountain.

Rob: Do it because you love it! And get an education or find a career that you can fall on. For us, it was like this is what we do, we're musicians, we're a band. We were narrow in our focus. We were driven, but it also burned us out quickly, Larry and myself, to the point where we kind of gave up on music, instead of saying "Hey, I'm doing this, but I've also got this thing going on".

Larry: We did both things totally wrong. Instead of going back to school and doing the music thing, it was the opposite, like "I'm quitting the band and I'm just going to focus on family and work and get some education or whatever" instead of saying we could do both. Now that I think about it, I wish I could go back. That's the only thing I wish I could do is go back and do both. But we got lucky. Rob and I work in the corporate world and so we're still able to do this.

James: See, I was the one with the most regrets, because this is what I have to do now. I love music totally, don't get me wrong, but there are times like last year, these guys know, I killed myself last year just to pay the bills, and I'm not doing that this year. I came home with high blood pressure and everything, eight months out there every day, and Jaeger, and no sleep, and I'm not a spring chicken any more. But this is primarily what I will be doing to my end of days, when that lady in black comes to kiss me, I'll be ready!

Larry: We kind of rambled on a bit with this question, but I guess it's an important question.

Yeah, having a back-up plan is important. But thank you all for your time.

James: Thank you very much for the interview!