IRON MAIDEN ALBUM REFERENDUM 2020: Results -> Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son wins!

Are you satisfied with the results?


  • Total voters
    25
What's with all the votes for (against) Piece of Mind? Is seven all-time classics too many on one album for ya?

It is the weakest overall album of the run between TNOTB and SSOASS. Frankly every album left is better than it in my opinion. Doesn't make the album poor just the least good of what is left.
 
It should be, but survivors tend to be extremely political
"political", I don't know, rather "demographic" in my opinion. This kind of games reflect who the majority of Maiden fans are on a given forum, including in terms of age and origin. Here, for example, the majority seems to be mostly young people (below 30) and/or from the USA, hence the emphasis on the periods when Maiden became popular (again) there, i.e 1984-1986 + the reunion, with a relative disregard from the historical period (1980-1993 aside from the PoM -> SiT stretch. Mind you, I believe the fracture between digital natives (for whom where they live is less relevant as regards getting access to Iron Maiden and who could virtually have access to the entire discography at once) and those who discovered the band before has also to be taken into account.

Of course, I don't mean that people over 30 who live in other countries cannot prefer the recent albums though, but popularity votes are mostly nostalgia (as if one could rate an album 'objectively' anyway) so the results depend a lot on the "segment" each forumer belongs to. And this is why AMOLAD is probably going to reach top 3 and that Fear of the Dark is already out... which would be inconceivable if only French people aged 35-45 could vote, I think. ;)
 
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And this is why AMOLAD is probably going to reach top 3 and that Fear of the Dark
Well that's all relative. I'm not french nor american and am 1 year short of 45 but if it was up to me Fear Of The Dark would be the first one to go and AMOLAD only gets beaten by the 1983 to 1988 stretch. And if it is true that AMOLAD doesn't gather that much unanimous praise among Maiden fans in my country there's a lot of people who hate FOTD's guts just like me. The only big difference I spot regarding my home country is the lack of love in this board for their first two albums. Almost every Maiden fan here puts them right after the so called "golden era" (TNOTB to SSOASS) if not higher. Then there are people who have their own particular picks... like me who really like The X Factor and to a lesser degree Dance Of Death.
So I think one can speculate about how some generational and geographical common traits influence fan's preferences. It may even be applicable to a certain percentage but in the end I think that it's mostly about your own personal musical taste.
 
I only voted for it because it has the third most chance of currently being voted out and I will vote for literally anything to save BNW.

If you instead voted for Somewhere in Time, your statement would still be true. Piece of Mind has better top tier (Trooper, Revelations, Still Life) and deeper mid-range (Icarus, Eagles, Dune). I get that Quest for Fire and Sun and Steel may not be anyone's favorite but we're talking about 7 minutes and they have some really cool parts. I'd put them on par with Judas My Guide, which so many people seem to love for some reason.
 
If you instead voted for Somewhere in Time, your statement would still be true. Piece of Mind has better top tier (Trooper, Revelations, Still Life) and deeper mid-range (Icarus, Eagles, Dune). I get that Quest for Fire and Sun and Steel may not be anyone's favorite but we're talking about 7 minutes and they have some really cool parts. I'd put them on par with Judas My Guide, which so many people seem to love for some reason.
We’re voting for albums as a whole, not just the songs. An album has to work well enough as a unit, and PoM doesn’t 100% do it for me. The production is a little dry for a start. It makes songs like Revelations sound a bit stale. Then while it’s easy to point out Quest and S&S, Die With Your Boots On is also a bit on the low end of the album - has some great moments, but the chorus kinda just comes off as... silly, I guess. To Tame A Land is cool, but that’s about all it is; aside from Bruce’s performance, it’s one of their least memorable ‘80s epics. And Flight Of Icarus sounds way better on Live After Death than it does in the studio because it doesn’t have that insane amount of vocal overdubs in the chorus. That leaves, me personally, with only three all time classics that I think are perfect on the album — Eagles, Trooper, and Still Life. It’s a great album, but if you wanna get nitpicky it just doesn’t hold up as well as a lot of the band’s other records. But that’s just me.
 
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