The albums sound great on CD, but if you have really good headphones TBOS comes off as hollow. Hence I stick to my physical copy.I might be alone in this, but I enjoy his production job on Maiden's albums. Brave New World sounds very fresh, crisp and clear, and the drum sound in A Matter of Life and Death might be the best drum sound in any album I've ever heard. The Dance of Death production has grown on me and now it doesn't bother me at all, and The Final Frontier and The Book of Souls aren't bad either.
Aces High isn’t overplayed but it doesn’t usually work as well because Bruce can’t hit the notes. From what I’ve heard on this tour though, it sounds like he might finally have nailed it.I would accept that argument if album tours featured just songs from the newest album. "The Trooper", for example, appears everywhere, including album tours, which makes it much more overplayed than "Aces High". "The Evil That Men Do" has appeared in more tours than "Aces High", and no one's talking about that.
About it being an "unimaginative opener", I don't know exactly what gives that impression (I myself used to think like you do), but it has only opened 2 tour before this one since 1999. There were about 2 history tours during this period (3, if you count the 2010 leg of the Final Frontier Tour) which didn't feature "Aces High" at all, plus in the Maiden England Tour it didn't show up until the encores. So no, it's not actually overplayed (neither as an opener, nor even as a standard song in the set).
I forgot to mention that I'm sad Death or Glory isn't played. Not because of the song per se, more because I was looking forward to even crazier monkey antics on stage
Solo proper starts at ~02:36 (not "2:15") and sounds pretty like the album version.
Laziest complaint of the thread so far?
If they usually get better with each concert does this mean by #4 they will blow our minds far more than they’ve already been blown?Flying monkeys with flamethrowers. That would be mind blowing.
I'll wait for more shows to see how good this tour is but now I'm still hyped like hell. On other note - they seem to be in pretty good shape on first show, that's not so common from what I saw on earlier tours - question is how they did it?
Based on the setlist, I think this tour required more rehearsals than usual. They pulled off 5 songs they hadn't done in 15+ years, plus the new props which they probably had to test on rehearsals as well. Other tours mostly featured more classic staples that didn't require that much practice.question is how they did it?
Awesome idea.Maybe the next tour will have monkeys with flamethrowers.
Pff, you're the one who called H lazy for literally no good reason. Sounds better than the album version to me.He plays the neoclassical part different from the record (as he has always done), but he’s also just playing a legato flurry of notes a la Dave in the section right after it.
I know this solo, and that is a very, very simplified way of playing it. Check your facts before calling out laziness.
FTGGOG was played much too slow. That's my only complaint performance-wise.