Everyone’s favourite corpse-makeup band, POWERWOLF, set about re-recording some of their classic songs recently, and are releasing them as a compilation called The Best of the Blessed. The new songs sound – and there’s really no other word for it – AWESOME:

Man, I love those goofballs. They are so much fun to listen to, whether on the train or during a hard workout or just while writing.

Much to my shame, I’ve never seen them live, mostly because their tours tend to be in Europe rather than the USA and I don’t think they’ve ever toured in Asia. It’s my fervent hope that I get to see them play live in Europe sometime soon – along with IRON MAIDEN, for whom they would actually be the perfect opening act. I think POWERWOLF would probably be one of the very few opening acts that fans might look forward to seeing.

A man can dream, after all.

Also, and I’m genuinely curious about this – how the hell do they manage to play so tight live without a bass player?!?! It’s not like Falk Maria Schlegel (real name Christian Jost) is playing the bass the way Ray Manzarek from THE DOORS would do on the Hammond organ – and if you think that’s easy, then you really have to watch a live performance from them to understand how hard that actually is.

More likely, the drummer is using a metronome to keep precise time – which is why the concert songs are played at precisely the same speed as the studio stuff – and the bass and backing vocals and other effects are piped out of a laptop connected up to the speakers.

It’s a bit depressing, really, when you consider that IRON MAIDEN still does things pretty much the old-school way to the greatest extent possible. Even when their songs involve keyboards during concerts – most notably during “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” – there is an actual keyboard player in the background. That would be ‘Arry’s longtime bass tech, Michael Kenney.

Even so, there is simply no denying the sheer silly FUN of POWERWOLF. Metal bands sometimes take themselves way too seriously – POWERWOLF absolutely doesn’t.