DJMayes' Complete Ranking Of Maiden Songs
- Thread starter DJMayes
- Start date
Bombusbombus
Nomad
Of course you wait and see which one we think will win and then you post the other one at number one 
bornless1
Messiah Supreme. True Leader of Men.
Man DJ.... When I first saw DOD come up at # 3.....my heart was broken
I wanted so bad for this masterpiece and personal favorite of the three to win! Damn.....
But then I read your masterful breakdown of said piece of musical art. And I was filled with pride!! What a whopping review! I love that you view this song and album as I do! Spot on!!
I wanted so bad for this masterpiece and personal favorite of the three to win! Damn.....But then I read your masterful breakdown of said piece of musical art. And I was filled with pride!! What a whopping review! I love that you view this song and album as I do! Spot on!!
Collin
Chasing Ponce De Leon's Phantoms
And so the plot thickens...
RTTH and Empire is an unexpected mix. I tend to expect people to have a preference either for Maiden epics or rockers.
Black Bart
Ancient Mariner
"Run to the Hills" has to be the winner because of musical and "symbolic" reasons:
- the (highly subjective) length/efficiency ratio;
- it has a terribly efficient groovy recognizable intro which can be sung aloud, not to mention its chorus;
- it features one of the best Dave Murray solo (even if it is sometimes meddled with, live, with mixed results);
- it is the song that put Maiden on the map in the context of worldwide (hard) rock while "EOTC" is rather the band's swan song;
- as an object, the corresponding single has one of the best covers and one of the best B-side the band ever put out;
-"EOTC" cannot be performed live by Maiden's stage standards. Maiden being especially a live band, having "EOTC" as n°1 wouldn't make much sense, however subjective a fan's ranking is in the first place;
- Likewise, "RTTH" is a rock song while "EOTC" is more of a prog one, and I think the essence of Maiden is being a rock band before anything else. Besides, "RTTH" sticks to the traditionnal rock instrumentation while "EOTC" involves an outside writer who devised the string arrangement;
- "RTTH" is more of a collective effort than "EOTC": due to legal constraints (and his previous involvement in Samson), Bruce couldn't have any writing credit on The Number of the Beast. However, it has been said (by himself among others) that he had a hand in writing this song, along with "Children of the Damned" and "The Prisoner".
- the (highly subjective) length/efficiency ratio;
- it has a terribly efficient groovy recognizable intro which can be sung aloud, not to mention its chorus;
- it features one of the best Dave Murray solo (even if it is sometimes meddled with, live, with mixed results);
- it is the song that put Maiden on the map in the context of worldwide (hard) rock while "EOTC" is rather the band's swan song;
- as an object, the corresponding single has one of the best covers and one of the best B-side the band ever put out;
-"EOTC" cannot be performed live by Maiden's stage standards. Maiden being especially a live band, having "EOTC" as n°1 wouldn't make much sense, however subjective a fan's ranking is in the first place;
- Likewise, "RTTH" is a rock song while "EOTC" is more of a prog one, and I think the essence of Maiden is being a rock band before anything else. Besides, "RTTH" sticks to the traditionnal rock instrumentation while "EOTC" involves an outside writer who devised the string arrangement;
- "RTTH" is more of a collective effort than "EOTC": due to legal constraints (and his previous involvement in Samson), Bruce couldn't have any writing credit on The Number of the Beast. However, it has been said (by himself among others) that he had a hand in writing this song, along with "Children of the Damned" and "The Prisoner".
I'm going to guess RTTH will win
soundwave
Educated Fool
Wow, I didn't know that. What was the legal reason for Bruce's writing credit exclusion?
Black Bart
Ancient Mariner
Basically, he would still have had to give royalties to Samson for what he wrote for Maiden because the management hadn't bought them out yet.
matic22
Ancient Mariner
Which brings me to the question I wanted to ask earlier: Who wrote lyrics for Run To The Hills and Children Of The Damned? We know that Bruce wrote the lyrics for The Prisoner (said in various interviews: Bruce is into all this Prisoner stuff). Prisoner is credited Smith/Harris, while 22AA is credited Harris/Smith. We all know that 22AA is H's old song from Urchin days with Steve's lyrics. So we can say that writer of the lyrics is credited first, which confims that Bruce wrote lyrics to The Prisoner. The other two (COTD and RTTH) are not so easy to figure out. I would say that Bruce wrote the verses (judging on the writing style) and maybe lyrics for COTD, but RTTH I have no idea what Bruce's input might be.
matic22
Ancient Mariner
Yes you're right. But the question is still who wrote the lyrics to RTTH and COTD. I'm still pretty sure that Prisoner's lyrics are Bruce's work.
DJMayes
Ancient Mariner
And so we reach the end of the line.
2 – Run To The Hills
Whatever your feelings for it, it’s pretty difficult to argue that Run To The Hills is anything short of special. The entire band is at the top of their game throughout the entire song, and the result is a timeless classic. It had been out for more than 10 years before I was even born, but it is the song that introduced me to the band and remains to this day one of the best and the most representative songs Maiden have ever done. It remains the first song I introduce anyone to the band with, and is the most popular by far amongst anyone I’ve ever spoken to.
The drum intro to this song is perhaps the most iconic in metal – Painkiller is very strong competition – and is a wonderful way to start it off. I’m always surprised that drum intros aren’t more popular with such strong representation in songs like this, but at the same time it’s something Maiden have been fortunately sparing with all these years, so that this still hits with the same force it did. It’s electrifying, and I can only hope I get to see it live in person before Maiden retire. The guitar riff is similarly iconic. Bruce is obviously on top form, and the intro verse works wonderfully.
I’m always a fan of progression, so I really like the two different verses to begin with. This second one is their best gallop ever, aided perhaps by the duality as the lyrics sing about “galloping hard on the plains”. Everything comes together nice and cohesively, and it’s only when you single out a specific instrument you really notice any one of them. The differing perspectives between verses is also a very nice flourish – a small change, really, but one that not many bands would have done.
I have much more gushing to do about the chorus though. It’s simply the best they’ve ever done – but wonderful as Bruce is, it’s not because of him. Clive Burr is the man who made this song magical, and as much as I love Nicko I don’t think he’s ever matched the quality we see from Clive here. I get that Nicko is purportedly more technical, and if I listen to the likes of Where Eagles Dare and Powerslave I can understand. However, no amount of technicality can erase the fact that Run To The Hills is perhaps the only song that has me air drumming in the chorus, and the only song where those drums can steal the spotlight from a singer like Bruce.
Like the rest of the song, the solo is short and sweet. The pace is on point here as Dave delivers one of his best, and then we’re onto the bridge. I’m quite the fan of it, because singing along to it gives a similar breathless feeling to the one I mentioned on Hallowed, as does the outro.
Run To The Hills has been all over the place in my top 5, occupying pretty much every spot at one point or another, but it’s never dropped out of it. To me, it’s timeless. To others, it’s grown stale – and I can only hope that this doesn’t happen to me, though I imagine I won’t see Maiden enough times live for that to ever happen.
What about Number Of The Beast as an album then? It’s a difficult one to rate really, because whilst I don’t think it’s necessarily a cohesive album and I don’t listen to a third of the songs regularly, every other song is of a very high individual standard. How low can you rate an album where over half of the songs are live hits in their own right, and three stand amongst the best the band has ever done? For me this is a gatekeeper album. The albums I rate above it (Fear Of The Dark, Somewhere In Time, Dance Of Death, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, and The Book Of Souls) are the ones I enjoy consistently pretty much the whole way through. They need to be. In your heart of hearts, is there another album you can rate above this based solely on the hits? Powerslave is a fairly reasonable answer; otherwise I’ll be inclined to disagree.
1 – Empire Of The Clouds
Is it premature to say The Book Of Souls is my favourite Maiden album of all time? It’s the one year anniversary today, so it’s had time to sink in, but truth be told it didn’t take too long for the album to overtake Seventh Son.
It’s oversimplifying somewhat, but two important things for me to rate an album very highly is for it to have some highs, songs that make me want to play it in the first place, and for the corresponding lows to not be, well, low. It’s a matter of being consistent as well as having some genuine standout songs. The Book Of Souls succeeds massively on both counts. There isn’t a song on here I rate particularly low, and there are several I rate extremely highly. The track ordering mixes these wonderfully, so that despite the album length it’s never too long until a personal favourite. And, of course, it culminates in my favourite Maiden song (and thus, not entirely trivially, my current all time favourite by any band) in Empire Of The Clouds. It’s been a pleasure over the past couple of days to see this forum uniting behind Run To The Hills for once, to top this list. Alas, it was not meant to be.
One of the things that struck a chord in the responses was the feeling Run To The Hills deserved the win because of its historical importance, its position as one of their biggest live hits, and its closeness to the more traditional Maiden sound than Empire Of The Clouds. In a sense, it’s the more “Maiden” song. For the largest part, I agree with that. I do feel however that, sonic differences aside, this song is most definitely Maiden in a way that’s very special to me. It’s Maiden because of its ambition, its scale and its unerring dedication to masterful storytelling.
Iron Maiden is not my favourite band because of the bands sound. It’s a fantastic one, to be sure, but there’s no shortage of imitations or bands who have a sound that, in and of itself, I prefer – I generally think Judas Priest have more enjoyable solos, for instance. Iron Maiden is my favourite band because they are consummate storytellers and songwriters. There’s a level of quality to it above any other band, and in my opinion an intelligence to it as well. I recall the “comic book metal” tag being thrown around earlier – I’d heard it called “nerd metal”, and I honestly think it’s quite appropriate. No other band has gotten me to look at history, literature, religion or various other topics with the depth they have. That’s the magic touch, and it’s present in spades in Empire of the Clouds. Yes, it’s got pianos and a much more orchestral feel, but the hugely ambitious songwriting feels as Maiden as anything they’ve ever done.
The main piano melody to this song is wonderful. It pretty much embodies everything I've ever said about feeling over technicality (especially with Bruce playing it after having won it in a raffle!). It's a bit of an earworm, really. Even at the beginning at its most bare, this song has a lot going on, with other instruments following the piano riff. This is exemplary of something that's true of this song in general - there's a lot going on at any given moment. Every time I listen to the song I can focus on something else and feel like I'm discovering something new. At the same time, crucially, the vast majority of this is well mixed in the background, so that it doesn't feel overcrowded. Personally I'm a huge fan of having all of this texture, and think it's difficult to overstate just how special the piano is here.
The intro here is really nicely crafted - like an orchestral overture, as Bruce put it. It does a wonderful job of summing up the essential piano themes throughout the song, whilst cycling through them at a rate that's neither repetitive nor rushed - it feels incredibly natural. Alongside this comes a steady progression of additional instruments - from the orchestral synths fairly early on to the brilliant marching drums towards the end - and the first two minutes of this song rushes by. Of course, that's true for the entirety of this song. It says it's 18 minutes long, but it doesn't feel half as long as that.
Onto the verses then. The music is obviously the standout, but it's clear Bruce put his heart and soul into this song. He delivers a stunning performance throughout, making magnificent use of his lower range, and the lyrics are simply powerful. Did the Titanic fit inside? I don't know, but regardless of its factual accuracy I certainly choked the first time I heard it. There's a nice progression to be had even in the verses - the drums go from their imperious marching to a more traditional drum beat, and the electric guitars gradually increase in power. The vocal intensity increases at points, though this feels more to accentuate some of the wonderful lyrics than as part of the entire progression.
Starting around 6:30 is the stellar instrumental section. As a quantification to that, I think this instrumental section succeeds massively at what it is intended to do; to give a musical representation of the airships journey. It does this with a nicely evolving, lengthy piece of music with lots of beautiful flourishes here and there. It's really a section that works as a whole, rather than the strength of specific moments.
We begin with a guitar version of the songs main piano refrain. It's a nice touch, swiftly followed up by the SOS riff at 6:58. This is just a superbly clever touch, a clear musical signal that there is trouble ahead that builds the tension perfectly and balances a clever idea with an easily listenable execution. With the depth of the sound here, I like to picture it as the airship setting off from its destination, because it just has the perfect grandeur for that moment. And it's followed, at 7:18, with the triumphant riff as it's flying along its way. It's a beautiful riff, augmented by some absolutely wonderful flourishes by Nicko and that bell. It's quite subtle, but it sounds so good on this track. Bruce was right about Nicko being really important here. His drumming adds a lot to the song. To counterbalance what I said earlier about Nicko not being able to match what Clive did on Run To The Hills, I don't think Clive could produce such supremely cerebral drumming as Nicko does here.
The glorious tone fades, bit by bit, until at 8:29 we get SOS again, followed by a much more tense riff as the ship encounters its first weather. The riff from The Legacy is put to good use here, and Nicko augments it with a change in drumming that I think mirrors the sound of rain to great effect. This, with a build of texture, leads us really nicely into the first solo. I think the style of the solos work great here, and it's well paced and phrased.
As the solo ends, we're met with what I'm going to call the "urgent" riff at 10:36 (the one reused during the vocal sections before the crash). This is accompanied by some really atmospheric drumming by Nicko, and paints a wonderful picture of the airship struggling through the storm.
11:00 sees us met with a more meandering riff that's a little less frantic and a little more grand thanks to the horns in the background - one section in particular sounding like the Avengers tune at around 11:30. The guitars get more crunchy and tense, leading into a second solo. It's a nice atmospheric piece. It's not going to make the list of my favourite Maiden solos, but I'm not sure it needs to.
Back to 12:32 then, as Bruce reenters with altogether more frantic vocals over the top of the urgent riff mentioned above. 12:56 gives a tumultous break to this verse. There's a lot of tension in the "dun dun dun" sections here, and I like to view these sections as snapshots in time mirroring crucial events in the story that have just unfolded. In this case, I view at as them having not decided to turn back, and the first damage occurring to the ship. There's some wonderfully sparse drumming from Nicko here - after the guitar chords, listen out for some very subtle drumming that sounds almost exactly like the rain. A small progression with the drums and horns, and then we're back. The second verse ramps the tension back up and then some. The second "dun dun dun" break isn't quite so much of a break here - perhaps mirroring that the damage is already done.
The actual crash of the ship is excellently done. Why? I imagine that the two goals of musically representing such a crash and being enjoyable to listen to are very much at odds with each other, yet we get a result that paints a pretty vivid image whilst being entirely listenable. The creepy, pantomime keyboards are straight out of a black and white movie and give a definite sense of that, whilst Nicko's percussion does a very good job of doing what it needs to before fading into a mesmerisingly haunting keyboard solo.
Some aftermath is good, and 15:12 kicks that off to a good start with some hugely poignant lyrics - I think "3,000 horses silent as the ship began to die" is a genius one - and the return to the piano after all this time is a wonderful, melancholic shift that allows us to return nicely to the main refrain of the song. This then builds up some extra percussion for what I consider the genuine climax of the song - Bruce's vocal section.
"The dreamers may die, but the dreams live on..."
Powerful stuff, especially when delivered by a singer like Bruce Dickinson. This is one of the bands finest vocal sections in years, not because of any specific technical reason but because you can feel the singer giving it everything.
After said climax, we return to a massively stripped down outro. The piano and drums are the focal points, as well as Bruce's melancholic conclusion, but the guitars as they fizzle out are equally beautiful, if more subtle. And of course, the finality of the piano lid closing is superb.
With a band that puts out quality material as consistently as Maiden, it's difficult to imagine that any song is safe - but I don't fancy their chances of ever topping Empire. It's been my favourite song full stop immediately from release. It's lightning in a bottle. There are plenty of songs with similar levels of ambition, musicality or songwriting, but none in my opinion that have ever fused those three so perfectly together as this one did.
My only criticism of Empire of the Clouds? With the way it manages to compress 18 minutes into feeling shorter than most songs a third of that length, I'm genuinely worried it might make me age quicker.
On second thoughts, nevermind.
It's worth it.
- - - - - - - - - -
Thanks everyone who's been here reading through this (despite making their toes curl, in many cases)!. I'm not sure of an appropriate way of concluding further; this has been a long time in the making. I may update the list with subsequent albums if they happen, but that will be inserting them into here rather than redoing it. I'll probably also use it as a basis to properly fill out the individual song polls later on.
2 – Run To The Hills
Whatever your feelings for it, it’s pretty difficult to argue that Run To The Hills is anything short of special. The entire band is at the top of their game throughout the entire song, and the result is a timeless classic. It had been out for more than 10 years before I was even born, but it is the song that introduced me to the band and remains to this day one of the best and the most representative songs Maiden have ever done. It remains the first song I introduce anyone to the band with, and is the most popular by far amongst anyone I’ve ever spoken to.
The drum intro to this song is perhaps the most iconic in metal – Painkiller is very strong competition – and is a wonderful way to start it off. I’m always surprised that drum intros aren’t more popular with such strong representation in songs like this, but at the same time it’s something Maiden have been fortunately sparing with all these years, so that this still hits with the same force it did. It’s electrifying, and I can only hope I get to see it live in person before Maiden retire. The guitar riff is similarly iconic. Bruce is obviously on top form, and the intro verse works wonderfully.
I’m always a fan of progression, so I really like the two different verses to begin with. This second one is their best gallop ever, aided perhaps by the duality as the lyrics sing about “galloping hard on the plains”. Everything comes together nice and cohesively, and it’s only when you single out a specific instrument you really notice any one of them. The differing perspectives between verses is also a very nice flourish – a small change, really, but one that not many bands would have done.
I have much more gushing to do about the chorus though. It’s simply the best they’ve ever done – but wonderful as Bruce is, it’s not because of him. Clive Burr is the man who made this song magical, and as much as I love Nicko I don’t think he’s ever matched the quality we see from Clive here. I get that Nicko is purportedly more technical, and if I listen to the likes of Where Eagles Dare and Powerslave I can understand. However, no amount of technicality can erase the fact that Run To The Hills is perhaps the only song that has me air drumming in the chorus, and the only song where those drums can steal the spotlight from a singer like Bruce.
Like the rest of the song, the solo is short and sweet. The pace is on point here as Dave delivers one of his best, and then we’re onto the bridge. I’m quite the fan of it, because singing along to it gives a similar breathless feeling to the one I mentioned on Hallowed, as does the outro.
Run To The Hills has been all over the place in my top 5, occupying pretty much every spot at one point or another, but it’s never dropped out of it. To me, it’s timeless. To others, it’s grown stale – and I can only hope that this doesn’t happen to me, though I imagine I won’t see Maiden enough times live for that to ever happen.
What about Number Of The Beast as an album then? It’s a difficult one to rate really, because whilst I don’t think it’s necessarily a cohesive album and I don’t listen to a third of the songs regularly, every other song is of a very high individual standard. How low can you rate an album where over half of the songs are live hits in their own right, and three stand amongst the best the band has ever done? For me this is a gatekeeper album. The albums I rate above it (Fear Of The Dark, Somewhere In Time, Dance Of Death, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, and The Book Of Souls) are the ones I enjoy consistently pretty much the whole way through. They need to be. In your heart of hearts, is there another album you can rate above this based solely on the hits? Powerslave is a fairly reasonable answer; otherwise I’ll be inclined to disagree.
1 – Empire Of The Clouds
Is it premature to say The Book Of Souls is my favourite Maiden album of all time? It’s the one year anniversary today, so it’s had time to sink in, but truth be told it didn’t take too long for the album to overtake Seventh Son.
It’s oversimplifying somewhat, but two important things for me to rate an album very highly is for it to have some highs, songs that make me want to play it in the first place, and for the corresponding lows to not be, well, low. It’s a matter of being consistent as well as having some genuine standout songs. The Book Of Souls succeeds massively on both counts. There isn’t a song on here I rate particularly low, and there are several I rate extremely highly. The track ordering mixes these wonderfully, so that despite the album length it’s never too long until a personal favourite. And, of course, it culminates in my favourite Maiden song (and thus, not entirely trivially, my current all time favourite by any band) in Empire Of The Clouds. It’s been a pleasure over the past couple of days to see this forum uniting behind Run To The Hills for once, to top this list. Alas, it was not meant to be.
One of the things that struck a chord in the responses was the feeling Run To The Hills deserved the win because of its historical importance, its position as one of their biggest live hits, and its closeness to the more traditional Maiden sound than Empire Of The Clouds. In a sense, it’s the more “Maiden” song. For the largest part, I agree with that. I do feel however that, sonic differences aside, this song is most definitely Maiden in a way that’s very special to me. It’s Maiden because of its ambition, its scale and its unerring dedication to masterful storytelling.
Iron Maiden is not my favourite band because of the bands sound. It’s a fantastic one, to be sure, but there’s no shortage of imitations or bands who have a sound that, in and of itself, I prefer – I generally think Judas Priest have more enjoyable solos, for instance. Iron Maiden is my favourite band because they are consummate storytellers and songwriters. There’s a level of quality to it above any other band, and in my opinion an intelligence to it as well. I recall the “comic book metal” tag being thrown around earlier – I’d heard it called “nerd metal”, and I honestly think it’s quite appropriate. No other band has gotten me to look at history, literature, religion or various other topics with the depth they have. That’s the magic touch, and it’s present in spades in Empire of the Clouds. Yes, it’s got pianos and a much more orchestral feel, but the hugely ambitious songwriting feels as Maiden as anything they’ve ever done.
The main piano melody to this song is wonderful. It pretty much embodies everything I've ever said about feeling over technicality (especially with Bruce playing it after having won it in a raffle!). It's a bit of an earworm, really. Even at the beginning at its most bare, this song has a lot going on, with other instruments following the piano riff. This is exemplary of something that's true of this song in general - there's a lot going on at any given moment. Every time I listen to the song I can focus on something else and feel like I'm discovering something new. At the same time, crucially, the vast majority of this is well mixed in the background, so that it doesn't feel overcrowded. Personally I'm a huge fan of having all of this texture, and think it's difficult to overstate just how special the piano is here.
The intro here is really nicely crafted - like an orchestral overture, as Bruce put it. It does a wonderful job of summing up the essential piano themes throughout the song, whilst cycling through them at a rate that's neither repetitive nor rushed - it feels incredibly natural. Alongside this comes a steady progression of additional instruments - from the orchestral synths fairly early on to the brilliant marching drums towards the end - and the first two minutes of this song rushes by. Of course, that's true for the entirety of this song. It says it's 18 minutes long, but it doesn't feel half as long as that.
Onto the verses then. The music is obviously the standout, but it's clear Bruce put his heart and soul into this song. He delivers a stunning performance throughout, making magnificent use of his lower range, and the lyrics are simply powerful. Did the Titanic fit inside? I don't know, but regardless of its factual accuracy I certainly choked the first time I heard it. There's a nice progression to be had even in the verses - the drums go from their imperious marching to a more traditional drum beat, and the electric guitars gradually increase in power. The vocal intensity increases at points, though this feels more to accentuate some of the wonderful lyrics than as part of the entire progression.
Starting around 6:30 is the stellar instrumental section. As a quantification to that, I think this instrumental section succeeds massively at what it is intended to do; to give a musical representation of the airships journey. It does this with a nicely evolving, lengthy piece of music with lots of beautiful flourishes here and there. It's really a section that works as a whole, rather than the strength of specific moments.
We begin with a guitar version of the songs main piano refrain. It's a nice touch, swiftly followed up by the SOS riff at 6:58. This is just a superbly clever touch, a clear musical signal that there is trouble ahead that builds the tension perfectly and balances a clever idea with an easily listenable execution. With the depth of the sound here, I like to picture it as the airship setting off from its destination, because it just has the perfect grandeur for that moment. And it's followed, at 7:18, with the triumphant riff as it's flying along its way. It's a beautiful riff, augmented by some absolutely wonderful flourishes by Nicko and that bell. It's quite subtle, but it sounds so good on this track. Bruce was right about Nicko being really important here. His drumming adds a lot to the song. To counterbalance what I said earlier about Nicko not being able to match what Clive did on Run To The Hills, I don't think Clive could produce such supremely cerebral drumming as Nicko does here.
The glorious tone fades, bit by bit, until at 8:29 we get SOS again, followed by a much more tense riff as the ship encounters its first weather. The riff from The Legacy is put to good use here, and Nicko augments it with a change in drumming that I think mirrors the sound of rain to great effect. This, with a build of texture, leads us really nicely into the first solo. I think the style of the solos work great here, and it's well paced and phrased.
As the solo ends, we're met with what I'm going to call the "urgent" riff at 10:36 (the one reused during the vocal sections before the crash). This is accompanied by some really atmospheric drumming by Nicko, and paints a wonderful picture of the airship struggling through the storm.
11:00 sees us met with a more meandering riff that's a little less frantic and a little more grand thanks to the horns in the background - one section in particular sounding like the Avengers tune at around 11:30. The guitars get more crunchy and tense, leading into a second solo. It's a nice atmospheric piece. It's not going to make the list of my favourite Maiden solos, but I'm not sure it needs to.
Back to 12:32 then, as Bruce reenters with altogether more frantic vocals over the top of the urgent riff mentioned above. 12:56 gives a tumultous break to this verse. There's a lot of tension in the "dun dun dun" sections here, and I like to view these sections as snapshots in time mirroring crucial events in the story that have just unfolded. In this case, I view at as them having not decided to turn back, and the first damage occurring to the ship. There's some wonderfully sparse drumming from Nicko here - after the guitar chords, listen out for some very subtle drumming that sounds almost exactly like the rain. A small progression with the drums and horns, and then we're back. The second verse ramps the tension back up and then some. The second "dun dun dun" break isn't quite so much of a break here - perhaps mirroring that the damage is already done.
The actual crash of the ship is excellently done. Why? I imagine that the two goals of musically representing such a crash and being enjoyable to listen to are very much at odds with each other, yet we get a result that paints a pretty vivid image whilst being entirely listenable. The creepy, pantomime keyboards are straight out of a black and white movie and give a definite sense of that, whilst Nicko's percussion does a very good job of doing what it needs to before fading into a mesmerisingly haunting keyboard solo.
Some aftermath is good, and 15:12 kicks that off to a good start with some hugely poignant lyrics - I think "3,000 horses silent as the ship began to die" is a genius one - and the return to the piano after all this time is a wonderful, melancholic shift that allows us to return nicely to the main refrain of the song. This then builds up some extra percussion for what I consider the genuine climax of the song - Bruce's vocal section.
"The dreamers may die, but the dreams live on..."
Powerful stuff, especially when delivered by a singer like Bruce Dickinson. This is one of the bands finest vocal sections in years, not because of any specific technical reason but because you can feel the singer giving it everything.
After said climax, we return to a massively stripped down outro. The piano and drums are the focal points, as well as Bruce's melancholic conclusion, but the guitars as they fizzle out are equally beautiful, if more subtle. And of course, the finality of the piano lid closing is superb.
With a band that puts out quality material as consistently as Maiden, it's difficult to imagine that any song is safe - but I don't fancy their chances of ever topping Empire. It's been my favourite song full stop immediately from release. It's lightning in a bottle. There are plenty of songs with similar levels of ambition, musicality or songwriting, but none in my opinion that have ever fused those three so perfectly together as this one did.
My only criticism of Empire of the Clouds? With the way it manages to compress 18 minutes into feeling shorter than most songs a third of that length, I'm genuinely worried it might make me age quicker.
On second thoughts, nevermind.
It's worth it.
- - - - - - - - - -
Thanks everyone who's been here reading through this (despite making their toes curl, in many cases)!. I'm not sure of an appropriate way of concluding further; this has been a long time in the making. I may update the list with subsequent albums if they happen, but that will be inserting them into here rather than redoing it. I'll probably also use it as a basis to properly fill out the individual song polls later on.
18 minutes to be exact.
(I knew this was at the top because you posted it elsewhere a few months back.)
Nice work.
Great job DJ. Fantastic post you've created.
I'm pretty happy that Empire won, since I really think it's a better song than RTTH. I can perfectly understand how someone can say that EOTC is his favourite song.
Once some more posters share their opinion, I'll post my top 5 overrated and underrated songs (based on your rankings) so this post lasts and generates conversation.
Kudos for the hard work.
I'm pretty happy that Empire won, since I really think it's a better song than RTTH. I can perfectly understand how someone can say that EOTC is his favourite song.
Once some more posters share their opinion, I'll post my top 5 overrated and underrated songs (based on your rankings) so this post lasts and generates conversation.
Kudos for the hard work.