Not sure where they hell you're getting Messiah in his voice but he's got a good voice for what he does.

Running Wild is a great band. I especially love Death or Glory and Masquerade, but pretty much everything in the 80s and 90s is excellent in some regard. I've seen them twice - Wacken 2015 and 2018. The setlist can leave something to be desired, but still a lot of fun.

While Running Wild is more original, truthfully I prefer Blazon Stone as a band. Much tighter and more consistent songwriting, and yet to put out an even remotely weak album.

Everything between Gates and Rivalry is gold as far as I'm concerned and is one of the best run of albums ever in metal.

A sort of interesting one would be basically every member of Running Wild. Yeah, it's Rolf's band, he's always dictated the sound, he's always been the visionary, and for years I always considered the band to be "his" project with a revolving door of members. But really, the more you pay attention, the more you realize just how significant every member was to their overall sound in each era. For example, when Jens Becker joined, suddenly every album would have at least a few really long and melodic bass passages like the intro to Conquistadores or the entirety of Over the Rainbow, and when he left after Blazon Stone, that was it. Nobody did that again, that was Jens's thing. You could even argue that he was partially responsible for the dirty speed metal of the first two/three albums going by the wayside since his style didn't fit that at all, or maybe Rolf chose him after Under Jolly Roger specifically because of that, who knows? Majk Moti's guitar playing complemented Rolf's wonderfully, and they wrote some excellent riffs and classic songs together, but when Thilo Hermann joined, suddenly it was melody over all. Those signature melody lines picked up a lot of speed when he joined and carried the songs more than merely just complementing them, basically taking what started with Axel Morgan and pushing it up to eleven. When Jorg Michael started drumming, they came the closest to power metal they ever truly got thanks to his constant and precise double bass work coupled with Hermann's overt melodies. The Brotherhood comes out as the first album where Rolf handled all of the guitars and it's split pretty evenly between their signature sound and more simple hard rock tunes, and when yes-man and enabler Peter Jordan joined, those two joined forces to start writing almost exclusively mid paced cock rock tunes.

Rolf is the glue that ties Running Wild together, but everybody brought something significant to the table and it was always really obvious when a new person took up a spot in the band, for better or worse.

* - The whole "pirate metal" thing always annoyed me. Not just because aesthetic genres aren't real.