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Iron Maiden Post-2000 Or So

Started by DukeDeMondo, January 23, 2019, 03:12:58 AM

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DukeDeMondo

I was ill for a week or two there. Not very well at all. Ill in the head, as in "very dizzy and disoriented and sore behind the eyes, someway," and also ill in the head, as in "away with the fucking Jesuits and the marigolds." There were various contributing factors, an ill-advised medication alteration chief among them, but whatever the ins and the outs, I was ill for a while.

One morning towards the end of this Sick I had a dream in which I visited Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden to talk about the band's much-maligned 1990 album No Prayer For The Dying. I don't know why we were talking about that album, particularly. Reading about it afterwards I realised that it wasn't one that I'd ever really listened to, barring whatever bits and pieces went on to spill out over the Best Ofs. Very few bits or pieces, by the looks of things. I knew next to nothing about its reputation. I didn't know that it marked a conscious attempt to return to the red raw, "heap of scuzzy old ground-up guts" sort of feel of the first couple albums. Didn't know that. Didn't know that Adrian Smith left the band prior to the album's completion because he thought that the songs that had been written for it were utterly fucking stinking. That was news to me. Didn't know that it was recorded in Steve Harris's barn using equipment that had been borrowed from The Rolling Stones and that none of them had a wart in a choking fit's notion what to do with. I didn't know that they all thought it sounded like absolute fucking skip when it was finished and that the fans mostly agreed. I didn't know that it had this old sort of St Anger sort of air about it.

Didn't know any of that. Now I know all there is to know.

Also, I had recently watched a YouTube video in which Bruce Dickinson had explained how it's all going to be fine, you know. Brexit. Load of bananas over nothing. It's all going to work out for the best. Catch yourselves on. Iron Maiden, like. Brexit even Iron Maiden. Come on. Merkel, alright. Brexit. Iron Maiden.

Combined, this bit of looking and listening and snookered dreaming took up more of my time than I had allotted Bruce Dickinson or Iron Maiden in over 20 years. I was 11 or 12 years old, last time I gave a goosed fuck for Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden t-shirts I wore all night and day when I was 11 or 12 years old. Couldn't burn them off me. Didn't have very many albums, one or two, but I had a bunch of Iron Maiden t-shirts and some singles and I loved them all. My mum was up the walls. My Piece Of Mind cassette stalked the same devil-darkened corners of her imagination as the bootleg Exorcist VHS that my brother had brought home from work one day, and which was put in a box and left in the back garden because the 'fluence rising up off it was causing the carpets to ripple in the bedrooms above, by the way. This was the sort of chat my mum went over, any time these Piece Of Mind cassettes and bootleg Exorcist VHSs were mentioned.

I adored them, Iron Maiden. When I was 11 or 12 years old. "He's wired to that bloody Iron Maiden," folk said. Then I got into a load of punk and country and things like this and suddenly I didn't have any time for Eddie any more, whether he was a pyramid or a cyborg or Dickinson's Real Deal or the moon landings or whatever the fuck he was or he wasn't. Couldn't care less. Thought it was all a load of pompous old horseshit except for maybe the albums with Paul Di'Anno, both of which, a man with an Angelic Upstarts tattoo assured me one night, it was probably still OK to like a bit.

The days following that dream I've spent reading up on everything they've done since the release of The X Factor, the first album with Blaze Bayley on vocals and the last one I can remember paying any attention to. From what I can gather, Virtual XI, the second and last album with Blaze Bayley, represents something of a nadir, whilst Brave New World, recorded in 2000 with Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith both back on the scene, heralded a spectacular and unexpected rebirth. A string of increasingly ambitious and critically-lauded albums followed, it seems, culminating in 2015's Book Of Souls, widely regarded as one of Iron Maiden's very best Iron Maiden albums ever.   

I tried to listen to some of this more recent stuff but I inevitably wound up jumping off the boat around the mid-way point of any given track to swim back towards the stuff I loved when I was wee, because oh, oh, that sounds a bit like "Quest For Fire," do you remember "Quest For Fire," but, do you? Remember fucking "Infinite Dreams?" What? Do you remember "Caught Somewhere In Time," do you remember, even?

Anyway I'm on some sort of Iron Maiden kick at the minute is all there is to it. I'm enjoying myself immensely, and now that the nostalgia bombs have mostly all gone off I've decided that I do want to hear the best of what there is to hear, far as post-2000 Iron Maiden goes, but I don't want to just start ploughing through the albums on Spotify one by one in chronological order because some of them are longer than Eid and I just cannot be fucking bothered, to be honest. There seems to be a live album for every studio album, too. Cannot be fucking bothered. I have heard some of Book Of Souls, and I thought it was pretty good, what I heard. I've heard some of The Final Frontier, and I thought that was even better, what I heard of that.

Please tell me what to be fucking bothered with, please. Also, No Prayer For The Dying, if you like. And Blaze Bayley. What about that? Are those albums worth revisiting? I remember "Sign Of The Cross" pretty well. The reviews I've read of The X Factor suggest that "Sign Of The Cross" is fairly indicative of much of what they had to offer during that era, and it's decent enough, really, "Sign Of The Cross." And the one about all the scenes out Falling Down that Blaze Bayley and Janick Gers could remember seeing. That was pretty solid, I think. What other Michael Douglas films might Blaze Bayley and Janick Gers have remembered seeing bits of, had Blaze Bayley hung around a bit longer?

"Last Vegas,
Billy, Archie, Paddy, Sam,
Last Vegas,
Winking, Blackjack, cards in hand
Take it all, the man demands,
The manager demands they take it all!
"

This sort of thing.

chveik

I haven't listened to Iron Maiden in ten years, but if I remember correctly Brave New World is pretty decent, Dance of Death is middling and The X Factor is a big pile of shit, except for "Sign of the Cross" I suppose. but you should probably stick to their first albums.
Hope this helps :)

kalowski

I got off the bus at Live After Death.

Kane Jones

I love Maiden. Nothing will peak the golden run of the debut through to Seventh Son, and No Prayer For The Dying and Fear Of The Dark are pretty awful, particularly the former. Agreed that Brave New World is a real return to form, and I really like A Matter Of Life And Death, The Final Frontier and The Book Of Souls. A Matter.. in particular is a superb collection of songs. I must admit I've never listened to the Blaze Bayley stuff. His voice doesn't appeal to me. Dance Of Death is pretty dire, apart from the title track.

Quote from: kalowski on January 23, 2019, 06:35:35 AM
I got off the bus at Live After Death.

This is the highlight of their career for me. A brilliant live album.

magval

Duke listen to Paschendale from Dance of Death. It's got Morse code and a French horn and the playing is fucking lovely on it. I've only recently decided to give Iron Maiden a fair shot (I've only ever listened to Powerslave and a few singles since I first heard it 15 years ago) and am likely going to devote the summer to them. But aye, that one, Paschendale is a fucking monster.

kngen

I quite liked A Matter of Life and Death, but found The Final Frontier to be a bit of a snooze - those looong, looong monopaced songs. Book of Souls changed it up a bit, but I wish Steve Harris would get out of his mid-paced songwriting groove. I mean, it's not often they don't play Aces High or The Trooper etc live - so he must see the response those songs get. It's not the lyrics that's getting the blood pumping, Steve - you should lift your feet a bit!

kalowski

Quote from: Kane Jones on January 23, 2019, 09:57:35 AM
This is the highlight of their career for me. A brilliant live album.
Me too
Contains my favourite versions of many of their tracks. The Trooper and Hallowed Be Thy Name are outstanding.

DukeDeMondo

Thank you very much for contributing, folks.

Quote from: Kane Jones on January 23, 2019, 09:57:35 AM
A Matter.. in particular is a superb collection of songs.

I've read a fair few positive reviews of that record, I'm going to give it a go next, I think. I'll just start at the start and see how far I get.

Quote from: magval on January 23, 2019, 04:27:32 PM
Duke listen to Paschendale from Dance of Death.

Thank you for the recommendation. I did listen to it, listened to it a time or two. I thought it was excellent. Fantastic, altogether. Just the stuff, that. I'm guessing, given what's been said about it up above there, and also taking into account the handful of reviews of it that I've read, that nothing else on that album is anything like as good as that? 

Quote from: kngen on January 23, 2019, 06:01:05 PM
I quite liked A Matter of Life and Death, but found The Final Frontier to be a bit of a snooze - those looong, looong monopaced songs.

The stuff I'd heard from TFF I really liked, but I just listened to "When The Wild Wind Blows," which I hadn't heard but had read plenty of glowing talk about. I thought it was fucking crap, to be perfectly honest. Would've been fine if it had been maybe two and a half minutes long, maybe. The melody's pretty enough an' all. But nobody in their right mind or any kind of mind needs eleven minutes of that. Eleven minutes of nothing remotely interesting going on over and over and over and over and over. Imagine you went to see them live and that was included in the set. Fucking hell. Imagine. Hearing those "wild wind" FX coming over the PA. Lads all nodding at each other. Here we go, alright, Wild Wind thing next. Jesus oh. Your heart would do some sinking.   

shh

I've only heard snippets of the Blaze era, sounded dreadful. Bruce does a cracking rendition of Sign of the Cross though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBanU-AHMqg

While he was away he did some pretty decent solo stuff too, a lot more lively than latter day Maiden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DL7R-We3ZI

magval

Great point, Chemical Wedding is one of my favourite albums ever. Check out Book of Thel. Adrian Smith played guitar on that album as well.