And to add in yet another take on this:
I think most people here will know that my favourite album is
The X Factor. But I do not think it is a very good album to start with. It took me about half a year or longer to get into it. In fact, I got into
Virtual XI before
The X Factor clicked with me.
The X Factor is an album that, for the lack of a better word, takes a lot of intimacy to get into. By that I mean, it does not do for casual listening or putting it on five or six times and wait for it to open up. It takes effort to get into it. Listen to it closely, and try to actively discover what it has to offer. Maybe you even need to suffer through some hard times, as I did when I started to like it. I can only say that, although I have listened to it hundreds of times, and I mean really listened to it and not just put it on for background noise, I still tend to discover new facets.
I got into Iron Maiden around the time
Brave New World came out, and it was the second album I knew, after Number of the Beast. So it is quite special to me, and of course I was the rebellious teenager back then, so it appealed to me for numerous reasons. Nevertheless, it is probably a good starting point because it comes closer to the classic eighties sound than most other releases. Next in line would probably be
Dance of Death and then
Virtual XI. But honestly, once you've gotten into one of them, the order really doesn't matter. Here again, I would like to state that
A Matter of Life and Death is probably my favourite album overall after
The X Factor - although I wish to emphasise at this point that I love all the classic eighties albums with all my heart! Without wanting to get into the tedious trench war that you can observe in many threads here, I think that
No Prayer for the Dying and
Fear of the Dark are sub-par albums by Maiden standards, but I would never say they are bad. The latter has some brilliant songs (
Afraid to Shoot Strangers,
Judas Be My Guide and
Fear of the Dark to name but a few), and
No Prayer is a fairly consistent album which has a lot of good songs and only two I really dislike (as opposed to
Fear of the Dark, which has four or five). I just personally do not think it has very much material that sticks out when compared with the rest of the Maiden discography.
Maybe it would be recommendable to listen to one of the live albums released since the 'reunion'.
En Vivo!, which was released only this year, offers a good selection of post-eighties material intermingled with some of the old classics we love so much. It could serve as a nice introduction to what the band has been up to for the past twenty years. The same goes for
Death on the Road and
Rock in Rio, but they obviously omit some of the more recent material.
And since everybody started talking about the solo albums, Bruce's
Chemical Wedding and Blaze's
Silicon Messiah rank as two of the best metal albums ever for me. All of Bruce's albums are great, although some take a lot of time getting into, and Blaze's early releases are amazing also. I guess I'm starting to like
Promise and Terror a bit more than I used to, but
King of Metal strikes me as quite bad. That may change over time, however. Again, maybe go for the live albums first - in this case
Scream for me Brazil and
As Live as it Gets respectively.
Just as a friendly moderator request, I would like to ask you to go easy on the full stops please. Ending each sentence with "......" is quite difficult to read.
Happy listening!