Your Maiden blasphemy

Empire of the Clouds.... It has the ingeredients to be the ultimate Maiden epic but ends up not quite hitting the mark and sounds a bit s**t in parts..
 
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The first album is my favourite so I'd obviously prefer it over the reunion ones. I'd probably say it was better but not that it absolutely smashes them

Empire of the Clouds.... It has the ingeredients to be the ultimate Maiden epic but ends up not quite hitting the mark and sounds a bit s**t in parts..

And yeah, it's a great but flawed song. Little bit too long and the composition is pretty flawed in some parts
 
I love The Red and the Black, it's a top tenner for me.

But, Steve's little riffs and the beginning & end , when he runs down the neck really fast, sound like a jumbled mess to me.

I can't 'hear' what he's supposed to be playing there.
 
It's my #8. Good to see some more appreciation for it!

But Steve's intro is one of my favorite parts of the song, so...

Oh, I love the intro, and the outro, just not that one time he runs down the neck and it all blurs together.


And as far as appreciation, TRATB was one of those ones that grew on me. I loved the 'audience partitcipation riff the first time I heard it, because the first five notes, note for note, come straight from the closing part of Fear Of The Dark riff.

I've always always thought that one little thing was really cool, so to have it show up years later, with a big, prominent role in a song, really made me happy, and still does to this day.
 
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I agree with all of this.


I don’t know the timescale in which the song was written and produced but I feel if it had been written and nurtured over a substantial period of time then it may have overcome many of its flaws and the sections might have flowed a bit more naturally. Just has that “thrown together” feel about it.
 
Well, I think you're right in saying it could've been better had Bruce worked it out prior to the recording sessions, I think it flows nicely though. Every part of the song serves a purpose in telling the story, but I just found it all a bit predictable and very typical for a Maiden epic. I was probably expecting too much.
 
The first album is a eternal classic, but no way it is better than the reunion albums, IMO ! They are all very good and strong albums.

There's some grand old rubbish afloat on many of those records buddy. Stuff you cannot unhear. Stuff like Charlotte can be forgiven as they were young and naive.
 
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