NO PRAYER FOR THE DYING - Your thoughts…

[Eddie's Uncle]

I am perplexed about all the dislike for Mother Russia. Brilliant song. Experimental for Maiden, but with great results (not every Maiden experiment worked out that well). The middle section gets a bit carried away, but the same is true for the middle sections of ATG or Montsegur, so it's not really a minus.
Title track, RSRD, and yes, Holy Smoke are also on the list of great Maiden hits. That's "only" 4 really great songs, but at least they are true gold. Daughter is a bit cheesy, but still a good song. The album's problem is that the remaining songs are not just less great, but even awful at times. PEN1, Assassin and HIY are dreadful. Tailgunner has some great riffs, but is basically a poor man's Aces High with an annoying chorus and subpar vocal lines.

 

[dickinson1978]

I am perplexed about all the dislike for Mother Russia. Brilliant song. Experimental for Maiden, but with great results (not every Maiden experiment worked out that well). The middle section gets a bit carried away, but the same is true for the middle sections of ATG or Montsegur, so it's not really a minus.
Title track, RSRD, and yes, Holy Smoke are also on the list of great Maiden hits. That's "only" 4 really great songs, but at least they are true gold. Daughter is a bit cheesy, but still a good song. The album's problem is that the remaining songs are not just less great, but even awful at times. PEN1, Assassin and HIY are dreadful. Tailgunner has some great riffs, but is basically a poor man's Aces High with an annoying chorus and subpar vocal lines.

Tailgunner and mother russia if you compare to what they did in their previous album (seventh as you know) is exactly the problem with n prayer. For me its more a rock album. But not their worst one but one of their worst

 

[Helmuth Von Moltke]

I loved both No Prayer and FOTD at the time. I think being young youre maybe a bit less critical, or at least discerning...

But I can barely listen to either now and I sort of hate that. FOTD and a Real Live One were everything to me at the time.

Still think Live One is great, very happy memories of sneaking away from a School trip to run into Virgin Megastore to buy my first ever record!

Would love to get back to those vibes and appreciate those records again but old me is a moany twat

I still love Real Live One and Dead One for those reasons. Also, Raising Hell and Donington 92 on video, because of the vibes. Maiden looked and sounded and dressed more up to date and 90s, to my 12 year old senses.

Whereas I found LAD brilliant but very 80s by comparison, and I wanted a band that was rooted in the present not the past.

Having said that, I always thought NPFTD was a filler album and preferred the highs and epics and art of FOTD

 

[Eddie's Uncle]

I think the production gets too much heat as well. They wanted to strip it down, which was a good decision in theory, given the musical direction of the album. Unfortunately they went a step too far and ended up with a sound that had too little punch. However, it still sounds better than XF and VXI, which were their lowpoint in terms of sound.
While not top notch, the spund on NPFTD at least fits to the songs, and they did not try to sound trendy.

I think NPFTD is another example for my thesis I also mentioned in other threads: some albums have a built-in opinion that becomes a law of rock. Everybody constantly says they are masterpieces / turds for decades and it becomes a sort of common myth being accepted as truth.
Works both ways.
NPFTD constantly gets slammed as Maidens worst or 2nd worst album, so many people automatically assume it is wben they hear it.
It's like in that oreo experiment: test subjects got some oreos and some cheap oreo-fakes, and were asked which one tasted better. They did not know that both brands were switched: the cheap copies were labeled true oreos, and he real ones as fake. Almost every test person said the cheap ones were better, thinking they were real oreos.
It works with music too.
Thats why Appetite For Destruction will always be praised until the end of mankind, and NPFTD will always be at the bottom end of Maiden ratings.

 

[Yax]

I think the production gets too much heat as well. They wanted to strip it down, which was a good decision in theory, given the musical direction of the album. Unfortunately they went a step too far and ended up with a sound that had too little punch. However, it still sounds better than XF and VXI, which were their lowpoint in terms of sound.
While not top notch, the spund on NPFTD at least fits to the songs, and they did not try to sound trendy.

I think NPFTD is another example for my thesis I also mentioned in other threads: some albums have a built-in opinion that becomes a law of rock. Everybody constantly says they are masterpieces / turds for decades and it becomes a sort of common myth being accepted as truth.
Works both ways.
NPFTD constantly gets slammed as Maidens worst or 2nd worst album, so many people automatically assume it is wben they hear it.
It's like in that oreo experiment: test subjects got some oreos and some cheap oreo-fakes, and were asked which one tasted better. They did not know that both brands were switched: the cheap copies were labeled true oreos, and he real ones as fake. Almost every test person said the cheap ones were better, thinking they were real oreos.
It works with music too.
Thats why Appetite For Destruction will always be praised until the end of mankind, and NPFTD will always be at the bottom end of Maiden ratings.

That's some mighty fine hoop jumping that No Prayer isn't judged on its merits but is a result of group-think. I think Tailgunner is decent, Daughter is great (relative to Maiden's creative standards). The rest is, for Maiden, bland and boring. I thought that in 2004-2005 when I got into Maiden (and I do that now). I did not know enough about Maiden back then and what albums were popular. I bought it on CD, listened to it and thought "this is such a letdown", following the listening experiences I had gotten Killers (which I, to be fair, thought was a bit weird) -SSOASS + BNW and DoD.
Mother Russia is fine, though I think it might have been better off as an all-instrumental, considering there is very little singing going on in the song. Go instrumental all the way.

If No Prayer was a debut album from a band, it would be a terrific album. Really. But it isn't. But it's a weak album relative to most of Maiden's discography. It's a release by a somewhat worn-out band 10 years into releasing records that sounds like a pro-runner huffing and puffing, out of breath.

 

[Lego]

I am perplexed about all the dislike for Mother Russia. Brilliant song. Experimental for Maiden, but with great results (not every Maiden experiment worked out that well). The middle section gets a bit carried away, but the same is true for the middle sections of ATG or Montsegur, so it's not really a minus.
Title track, RSRD, and yes, Holy Smoke are also on the list of great Maiden hits. That's "only" 4 really great songs, but at least they are true gold. Daughter is a bit cheesy, but still a good song. The album's problem is that the remaining songs are not just less great, but even awful at times. PEN1, Assassin and HIY are dreadful. Tailgunner has some great riffs, but is basically a poor man's Aces High with an annoying chorus and subpar vocal lines.

Mother Russia's instrumental section and solos always struck me as a discount knock-off of the 7th Son title track.

 

[Eddie's Uncle]

That's some mighty fine hoop jumping that No Prayer isn't judged on its merits but is a result of group-think.

Well, group-think in music exists, that's an undisputable fact. Wether it applies to NPFTD is just a hypothesis, alright. But I don't think it is that far fetched or hoop jumping. Given what we know about modern psychology and cognitive functions of judgement, forming opinions and memory, it's actually quite possible.
Look up some psychology studies of Philip Zimbardo, it's quite interesting.
Of course, like any cultural phemomenon, it only ever is valid for a mass of people but says nothing about the individual.
So even if a million people dislike the album bc of group thinking, it's of course still possible that YOU and 10.000 others dislike it bc of your own judgement.

I listened to NPFTD for the very first time in early 1993, after FOTD had turned me into a fan in 1992. No internet and I had little contact to other fans back then. Didn't even know that NPFTD was considered their lowpoint. I instantly liked the album. Less so than SSOASS but still.
I had no preset expectation. It might have been different if I, as a newbie, had been exposed to a hundred comments and rankings telling me it's their worst. Of course, one still forms an own opinion, but presets play a significant role.

 

[Eddie's Uncle]

Mother Russia's instrumental section and solos always struck me as a discount knock-off of the 7th Son title track.

You are not wrong. For me, it doesn't matter much, because I frankly think that many Maiden solo sections "suffer" from randomness. The solos as such are mostly awesome, but the riffs that lie beneath them are often throwaway riffs that sound very random and detached from the rest of the song. That applies to some tracks off NPFTD, but to some of their classics as well. 22 Acacia, ATG, SSOASS, SOTTC, COTD...
It does not spoil the songs for me, but it makes me not care much about the solos in Maiden.

 

[Batman]

I listened to NPFTD for the very first time in early 1993, after FOTD had turned me into a fan in 1992. No internet and I had little contact to other fans back then. Didn't even know that NPFTD was considered their lowpoint. I instantly liked the album. Less so than SSOASS but still.
I had no preset expectation. It might have been different if I, as a newbie, had been exposed to a hundred comments and rankings telling me it's their worst. Of course, one still forms an own opinion, but presets play a significant role.

Similar case with me, I bought it somewhere around 1999 and I liked it. Thank god back then internet access was rather rare in my country.