This is the thread where we talk about Iron Maiden!!

I think you just outlined what would have happened if Steve Harris was mysteriously replaced by Jim Steinman.

I'd Be Caught Anywhere in Time (But I Won't Go There)

"Don't be sad
Two minutes to midnight
Ain't bad."

Ned otm re the cover

the new album cover kinda gives me, dare I say it, ‘X Factor’ vibes *shudder*

This is kind of... "stoner"?

I like it more than anything on Book Of Souls already.

their album covers kinda suck now

lol I was wondering and I didn't know the breakup with Derek Riggs was so spicy

For the album] “Somewhere In Time”: ‘We want a science fiction city. A bit like Blade Runner.’ Cause they just steal things out of films, that’s all they do,” Riggs said. “I was with them one time and we were walking around a bookshop somewhere, and they were looking at the book covers saying ‘Oh, we can have Eddie doing this, and Eddie doing that.’ starling ideas instead of trying something original. I just had enough of it. They run around making out like ‘they’re all our ideas.” but no, the ideas that they give me are stolen from other places. But I did the best I could to try to make them original and to inject some life into them.

“You know, Steve Harris’s idea was he wanted to link Eddie to his favorite football team [American soccer],” he said. “It’s like, you’ve got a legendary rock ‘n’ roll icon, and it’s the best selling icon there’s ever been in rock and roll and you want to tag it onto the ass-end of some f**king second-rate football team. From then on I just kind of lost interest: ‘If you want to do it, you f**king do it. Let’s see what you’ve got.’ And what they had was nothing.”

Adding to the discord between Riggs and the Maiden camp was the tremendous popularity of Riggs’ art work.

“The album covers – my work – was getting more attention than the music, and it upset their (the band’s) ego,” Riggs said. “So they were going around the world telling everybody that it was all their ideas and I was just a dumb monkey that painted it all. So this didn’t go down very well. And then they said to me. ‘Well, when are you going to come out with a good idea, because they’re all our ideas,’ and I was like “Oh, are they all your ideas? Then you tell me what to paint and I’ll paint it.” ’cause if you’re working real f**king hard to make these ideas, to make them continuous and make them cohesive the way they were – but then some f**king jackass can turn around and say something like that, it’s a real f**king slap in the face. It gets real old really f**king quick. So, from then on my attitude was like, ‘You tell me what to paint and I’ll paint it, because I’m obviously not getting credit for thinking of these ideas.’

When it comes to the latter day cover art nothing can beat Dance of Death for time and place cheese. On the flip side, I appreciated the perfect pulp of The Final Frontier.

Anyway I'm rereading the songtitles from this new one and it seems like they should have already used about half of those already, I'm mildly surprised they hadn't!

i wish they would just back up the money truck & make up with Riggs already, his covers were so fucking awesome

he sounds like kind of a dick too though?
which with bruce in the band already kind of explains the parting of ways a little too

also maybd ease up on harry & westham united mate jfc

I like the stripped-down covers, including this one. Striking as hell, which is what you want in a great LP cover. The track is pretty great to be honest. I was blindsided by Smith's spaghetti western rock riff but the thing has grown on me mightily over the last five days. I loved Book of Souls, so my expectations for this one are high.

As for the Belshazzar's feast thing, I'm pretty sure it was just a sneaky gag. The Belshazzar story is the origin of the "writing on the wall" idiom, which happens to be the title of the first single. My guess, anyway!

I like the stripped-down covers, including this one.

U fiend

hates fun, clearly

It's been all downhill since Powerslave, cover-wise, though A Matter of Life and Death was a nice recovery.

Ha, I spent too many hours examining every centimetre of Maiden covers and posters in the '80s! Maybe the spartan look appeals to the 50 year-old me.

But seriously, as far as "menace" goes, this is the most menacing cover since Killers. Less cartoony, more direct.

Riggs did all the singles covers too, of which there were many - including Sanctuary, which caused great controversy at the time as the woman Eddie was hacking to death looked exactly like Margaret Thatcher. Bet Harris is a Tory nowadays mind.

https://www.ironmaiden-bg.com/web/images/stories/single02_sanctuary_a_small.jpg

Some of the descriptions here are amusing

https://1000logos.net/iron-maiden-logo/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpuwr9fF7kw

I like it.

good chorus, nice gallops, good riffs/instrumental breaks, but not a lot of fat.

It's such a great track. Considering how much Kevin Shirley hates anything that isn't big, beefy riffs, this track was a shocker. It's far and away the "hookiest" track on the album, though.

Senjutsu time motherfuckers

The other night I dreamed I was at a Maiden gig presided over by an old, bald Bruce. They were playing "The Trooper" and cleared the area in front of the stage so a marching band could walk in and play along. When the marching band came in, though, the two sounds didn't mesh at all and merely created a droney mess. And that was my first Iron Maiden dream, as far as I can recall.

https://shoutybeardything.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/wvm7aqa.gif?w=300&h=124&zoom=2

Iron Charles Ives Maiden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsXW4COarLU

Streaming it for the first time. What are we thinking, ILM?

I need another listen but I was disappointed on first listen, cos it sounded like they went back to their pre-Book of Souls sound.

but i'm gonna give it another as it was 1 am when I listened.

I am digging "Stratego" kinda.

Okay, I already watched the "Writing on the Wall" video when it came out before.

It's just as I remember - Decent, not mind-blowing but not embarrassing, maybe 90 seconds too long.

I live-tweeted my thoughts on Thursday, and then put an edited version into my newsletter. Here it is:

Start with this: I don't like the cover art. It looks like a video game package, or a bootleg T-shirt.

Opening with an eight-minute not-fast song — the title track — was a bad idea. You need to get the listener's heart pumping right out of the gate. Why do so many bands fuck this up lately? (The drumming is really great, though.)

Track 2, "Stratego." And now we're galloping. This should have been the opener. There's an unfortunate "eyes/surprise" rhyme, and the synths are more prominent than I expected, but there are some excellent air-raid-siren moments. Bruce Dickinson really is an incredible singer.

Track 3, "The Writing on the Wall." I like the main country-metal riff, but things get kinda pirate-metal in the middle, which I'm not so into.

Track 4, "Lost in a Lost World." Starts off slow (and doesn't even sound like Dickinson singing), but gets rippin' after two minutes or so (of 9 1/2). Very heavy, bass prominent in the mix in a really good way.

Track 5, "Days of Future Past." The slow intro is a fake-out; at just 4:04, this is the shortest song on the record, and it rips. Big riff, operatic chorus, more excellent drumming.

Track 6 (last track on Disc 1), "The Time Machine." Oof, Dickinson just sang the words "impish whim." A lot of keyboards on this song, and more pirate-metal/sea-chantey riffing, plus a heavy breakdown/noisy guitar solo that feels super pasted-in. Not really feeling this.

Track 7 (first track on Disc 2), "Darkest Hour." Begins and ends with waves and seagulls. I think it's about Churchill or something. Slow, heavy, mournful, operatic...could be a leftover from A Matter Of Life And Death, honestly. (AMoLaD is my favorite 21st century Maiden album, so I'm OK with this.)

Track 8, "Death of the Celts." This is the shortest of the next 3 songs and it's 10:20. *Lots* of synth, and the verses are long and singsongy. Here come the guitar solos; will everybody get one? There's certainly time. (Turns out the answer is, yes, everyone will get at least one guitar solo.)

Track 9, "The Parchment": the main chugging riff almost reminds me of recent, proggy-heavy Opeth. The lyrics are ignorable; this song exists to justify the five minutes of guitar wank in the middle and at the (faster) end, and I'm fine with that.

Track 10, "Hell On Earth." The jokes write themselves, especially when you realize you're only halfway through the three-minute bass-and-synth intro. Very dynamic (dramatic quiet parts, REALLY LOUD PARTS), but honestly I kinda...wish it was an instrumental?

Conclusion: It's a 21st century Iron Maiden album — too long (82 minutes), 100% the product of their own musical comfort zone, but these fuckers can really play, and when they want to be they're still pretty amazing. 7/10, will probably never play front to back again.

i’m digging it so far, partway into disc 2

always impressed by how great they are at adding texture & different melodies within their longer songs to keep interest, i rarely find them plodding or boring

the Time Machine is a highlight so far, also Hell on Earth

Aid & Dave just fully crushing their solos, how are they always so fuckin brilliant?

i feel like i will def relisten to this over the coming weeks, already looking forward to hearing the whole thing again

they definitely do the 'long' songs better hear than they did on Brave New World, which beat choruses into the ground.

second listen now!

aw i like Brave New World

i like it, but I never loved it like some others did.

TIL that Clansman & Blood Brothers ate tied together storywise, and Death of the Celts on this new album is the continuation (hence the musical references in the solos)

*are

oh cool!

My review is at PopMatters.

https://www.popmatters.com/iron-maiden-senjutsu-album-review

Like all other 2000s Maiden albums, it takes time to settle in. I love the record a lot, but it took at least four listens for me to get there.

I was super impressed by the Pitchfork write-up. Sincere piece, no snark, understood the band's late-career direction. And like it said, anyone who wants a "Trooper" rewrite can go listen to any of the many, mighty fine trad metal traditionalists out there. Maiden isn't allowing to do that.

(sorry, Maiden isn't GOING to do that)

this is definitely growing on me a lot. they didn't wanna do a Book of Souls 2, and I was big on BoS cos it was full of riffs and ponderous long sections. but this brand of Maiden is good too.

and it doesn't suffer from the problems I had with, say, Dance of Death, or A Matter of Life and Death.

I'll give it a second listen this week, I think.

i really underestimated the melodic mastery of the album the first few times.

it's won me over. I don't love *every* song, but once I got over my pre-conceived desires,I found myself enjoying it a lot more.

:D

My final decision was that I liked a few songs, the album was a little more ponderous than I like even though they do that sort of thing way better than anyone else. Ultimately they're making themselves happy and not tarnishing their legacy. I won't listen to it nearly as much as the classics but I'll add it to my collection without hesitation and added "The Writing on the Wall" to my Best of 2021 Spotify playlist.

"Stratego" aside (it's their best short song since "Rainmaker") the two I keep going back to are the title track and "Hell on Earth". There's such a consistent feeling of gravitas to this album, from start to finish, that we've never really heard from Maiden before, and for me that's pretty darn appealing.

Hero

https://consequence.net/2021/09/iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson-covid-willy-shrivel/

Tickets on sale for NA, and tickets in hand for myself, VG and Mr. Veg for Oakland. Up the Irons, etc.