BRUCE DICKINSON SURVIVOR 2016: Results -> Darkside Of Aquarius wins!

Satisfied with the results?

  • Total voters
    15
The problem is the spoken-word vocals.

Seriously: I don't mind the chorus, but a song is more than a chorus. My dislike for the verses and the awful intro beats my enjoyment of the chorus, and that's why I have been voting for it since the first time it's appeared.
 
Toltec 7
Man Of Sorrows - Never been a big fan of this song. The lyrics are solid and Bruce gives a great performance, but the melodies and instrumental track are a bit trite and that bores me. In the words of Lars:

Magician - Not a bad song, but an average rocker. Gotta vote for something.

Welcome To the Pit - The only bad song on the whole album. Very generic and plodding. Also feels like it goes on forever.

Acoustic Song/Midnight Jam - Seem more like writing/recording experiments than fully fleshed out songs. Not really anything interesting there. Curious about the timeline though because Acoustic Song sounds like a precursor to Arc of Space.

Anyone else think the beginning sound effect on Man Of Sorrows is a lot like the one on IESF?

Love this album. Of all the Bruce solo efforts, this is the one that outdoes Maiden. Great mixture of heavy rockers and more proggy pieces.
 
Change of Heart, Cowboys, No Way Out
Toltec, Queen, Magician, Pit, Wicker Man, Jam

I don't understand the votes for Road to Hell, Cain, and Acoustic Song. They're all very good (or great) songs. Acoustic Song is a terrible name, but it's beautiful.
 
Guys, both cut the cr*p because you're co-terminating another brilliant track No Way Out...To Be Continued.
 
Eliminated after Round 10:
Midnight Jam - 14 votes
Toltec 7 Arrival - 12 votes
Welcome To The Pit - 12 votes
The Magician - 11 votes
Sacred Cowboys - 10 votes
 
Acoustic Song and the DULL Gods of War are the only two that I'd be unhappy to see survive.
 
Of the remaining short rockers, I think the title song is probably the weakest. Lots of chugging, little variation. Still a good song, but a notch below Road To Hell.
 
I aint voting cos I only really know Balls and AOB and the Best Of well but I love Acoustic Song and Gods of War! I thing Gods is a stunning tune. Mckindog, you crazy!
 
jazz from hell said:
When it came out, I had very mixed feelings. It felt like he'd given up, like he tried to hold on to the past, like he tried to be successful by doing everything he actually didn't want to do
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I kind of get the opposite feeling listen to it. When I hear Skunkworks, as much as I enjoy that album, Bruce seems out of his element and less confident in his singing. Accident of Birth sounds far more exciting and natural for him.
 
jazz from hell said:
Some background on the AoB album, as I understand it.

Bruce said that the whole Accident record was an Accident. He had planned Skunkworks to be his future musical direction and his future band. Before Accident, he used to say 'never metal again' and 'never Iron Maiden again'. Then Skunkworks was a gigantic flop. He thought his musical career was over (that's what Man of Sorrows is at least partly about -- yeah I know it's also about Crowley and he'd originally written it before, blah... it's still about that). He was in a desperate mood (he said somewhere that his wife urged him to do something about it already), when Roy called him up and told him he'd written some riffs that would be perfect for Bruce, and that they were metal. Roy was the whole driving force behind the album, according to Bruce. So Bruce thought, what do I have to lose, went to a LA and Roy's stuff felt great. So: nothing was planned, the whole album came as an accident.

After the release of Skunkworks, when the album was a flop, when they had to go on tour supporting Helloween, when life felt shitty for Bruce anyway, his mother told him that she had tried to get rid of him during pregnancy, but that the abortion somehow hadn't worked out. It made Bruce's crisis perfect. He was a failed abortion: an accident of birth.

So the album's title is about the accident of Bruce's birth as well as the birth of the album itself. The title track is about that, and about Bruce's whole situation during that time. You could say the people who welcome him home are his mother as well as the metal community. It's like, yeah, I'm here, but who gives a fuck. I'm 'at home' doing metal, which I've never wanted to do again, why am I even born.

When it came out, I had very mixed feelings. It felt like he'd given up, like he tried to hold on to the past, like he tried to be successful by doing everything he actually didn't want to do. Songs like Magician seemed almost Hammerfall-ish. The cover was a puppet called 'Edison'. No band pictures, only Bruce and Adrian, even if Roy was way more important. It took some time for me to realize that, given the circumstances, it was quite an honest record with good songs, and that Bruce's voice was actually better than anytime before.

Sorry if I'm tl;dr.
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Man of Sorrows is from (around) 1992. Still with Janick Gers on guitar.
 
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