HALLOWEEN - Don't Metal With Evil

Artist:  Halloween

Album: Don't Metal With Evil

Year:  1985

Genre:  Heavy Metal

So, another Halloween holiday has passed and I’ve never written about this record.  I find this realization strange because Don’t Metal With Evil and the band Halloween meant more to me as a kid than 95% of the music I listen to and own.  It would be impossible for anyone to know how ridiculous this oversight is for me, but I’ll try to explain why.  When I was a wide-eyed, impressionable 14-year old, Halloween were my band.  They were the band I thought of as larger than life.  I aspired to be just like them.  They made me want to play music.  It didn’t matter that they lived one city away from me, this was my local version of Ozzy or Kiss or Iron Maiden.  The self-labeled “Detroit’s Heavy Metal Horror Show” brought so much more to their presentation than other local bands.  Halloween were completely independent of label and corporate funding but put on concerts as if they had major league backing.  A Halloween show was chock full of pyrotechnics, graveyards, zombies, theatrics and a stage that would’ve fit nicely in Dracula’s castle.  The band knew exactly what they were doing and they were pros.  I’ve read the stories of their trials and tribulations in the 80s and their failure to lockdown any type of backing from a label.  Yet, especially considering that era of metal, it’s still a minor mystery to this day how Halloween did not get signed with anyone.

Does this mean Don’t Metal With Evil is one of the greatest metal records on the planet?  Well, no, probably not.  To a listener that didn’t come up with the album during the metal explosion in the mid-80s it can sound dated, underproduced and, I’m sorry Halloween…slightly cheesy.  Much like Lizzy Borden, Wild Dogs and Fifth Angel, Halloween plays traditional heavy metal with dashes of speed and power metal thrown in from time to time.  Yes, I used the present tense of the word play since they are still kicking it to this very day.  80% of the songs on DMWE are overflowing with references to dead things, ghouls, witches and all the light-hearted, jump-scare creeps of a 70s era haunted house.  The music is respectably typical of the period with the highlight being the Rick Craig’s masterful guitar playing.  Mr. Craig has a style that could be described as overly influenced by the great Randy Rhodes.  His ability to infuse his riffs with individualistic lead, legato licks sound as if he’s inserting random solos all throughout the album.  It’s a style rarely used in modern metal and one, for this reviewer at least, that is missed.  Goddamn if this isn’t a standout guitar performance.

As far as sound goes, Don’t Metal With Evil is an independent affair for sure.  The production reeks of naivety with its overbearing bass, flat drums, thin guitar tone and vocals that soar way too high in the mix.  Like so many self-financed bands in the 80s, production was a crapshoot.  Studios had no idea how to create tones and mixes that resembled the major label productions of the day.  What you hear is a band doing their best sound replication of Scorpions, Judas Priest and Maiden, but falling short without the money or production talent that was available to bands of that size and prominence.  Listening to early versions of this record will have you consistently adjusting your bass and treble knobs.

So why the verbose and high praise of this album at the beginning of this review?  Well, not everything having merit must be the best ever. Sometimes albums have a time and place in our lives that may not have the same effect if we came across it at another point.  Halloween’s commitment to their craft made them bigger than life in the Detroit area.  They sold out shows at 2,000+ seat venues, had radio play, a couple music videos and sold a ton of this album on two different formats.  Not bad for a “local” band.  The album contains solid heavy metal songs with a very street-level sounding production, influenced by what is easily most metal holiday of them all.  You can feel the band working to pound out these songs which show both flashes of brilliance and lower spots of mediocrity.  Therein lies the charm of Don’t Metal With Evil.  Halloween had conviction.  It shows in every second of this record and their live shows that they did their very best to put forth a product that represented their band to the highest standard.  As for 14-year old me, there were very few albums I would’ve put on my metal pedestal next to Don’t Metal With Evil.  I still have my original cassette which is basically ruined from the repeated listens I put it through for years, but my LP still gets tons of play.

Listen to "Trick Or Treat" here.