The album ages well

Sheriff_of_Huddersfield

Sheriff_of_Huddersfield

Not a KISS Fan
TBoS was one of the few post-reunion Maiden albums, aside fro DoD, that took me a little while to get into.

Senjutsu, by contrast, I immediately liked.

That said, TBoS ages very well and stands out as a very mature and musically rich album to me.

They also executed the songs very well on their live tour supporting the album.

I’d give TBoS, the “vineyard award” that I just came up with. It’s definitely a vintage that improves over time according to my ears.
 
Of the reunion albums, it probably fell of the most for me, when it came out, it was in my top 5 and nowadays I don't play it at all. Senjutsu I also don't put on all that often, but I like it much more. Excepting Eternity and the title track, I don't miss any of the songs in my rotation, some of them I've grown to like even less than previously (Death or Glory, Empire).
 
When I first got into Maiden, TBOS was my immediate favorite of the post-reunion albums. Aside from BNW way overtaking it in the coming years, it has remained near the top of my Maiden list. I like all the big songs, but also I like the deep cuts that many overlook. “When the River Runs Deep” is an underrated rocker. “The Great Unknown” and “The Man of Sorrows” are really cool moody tracks. The album feels like the band were really fired up to make a classic Maiden album that also featured a lot of new elements and ended up being a double album. I still really love it.
 
Can you believe it’s almost a decade old?

I remember prior to the announcement during the obligatory “fake Maiden album leak” period there was a fake Powerslave 2 album cover going around. The funny thing is that what we got is pretty much Powerslave 2:

- theme based on ancient civilization
- two Dickinson penned tracks
- The longest Maiden song
- The longest Harris epic (Rime and TRATB are about the same length).
- Uptempo rocker about dogfights.

Powerslave was also a pretty long album for the vinyl era, though not quite a double it did come close.

On a quality level, in terms of style, and in terms of general impression among the fanbase, I think the albums share a bit of a connection as well. I was never in the "Fillerslave" camp, but there's no denying the most unique and high quality material comes at the very beginning and very end of the album. It feels transitional. The straightforward riff driven material doesn't feel as immediate as what's on Piece of Mind, and the proggier sounding stuff would be refined on the next two albums. The big 4 cast a shadow over the rest of the album because they are the songs that take the band's sound to new heights.

As the album has aged, Book of Souls has a similar bookending thing where the best and most adventurous material for me is found on the opening and closing tracks. I wouldn't say there is a big four, but I think If Eternity Should Fail, Empire of the Clouds*, and The Book of Souls have emerged as the most memorable songs off the album. Like Powerslave, while I like a lot of the middle tracks it’s not hard to see why a lot of this album has kinda been forgotten over the years. I don’t see When the River Runs Deep, Shadows of the Valley, or The Great Unknown showing up on a lot of top song lists, and a couple tend to show up on the list of weakest Maiden songs.

At the same time though, it feels like this album is pretty positively remembered as a whole among the fanbase. Again, like Powerslave, the songs that carry this album and the general energy of the album seemed to sit right with a lot of Maiden fans and I notice the album ranking a little higher than some of the others I think partially because of the circumstances and hype around it as well as the immediacy of the material compared to AMOLAD, TFF, and Senjutsu. For me, though, all three of those albums plus BNW are better.

*While I don’t mind acknowledging the undertaking that this song was for the band, I really do feel like a lot of it doesn’t hold up. The piano and fake orchestra sounds are very cheap. The lyrics are great though and I enjoy the song once it picks up and starts to sound like a Maiden song, but it feels more like a proof of concept in retrospect than something that actually holds up.
 
I place it in the middle of the pack in my album ranking.

I absolutely love The Great Unknown and especially The Red and the Black (despite the plodding first 4:30) and the title track, while also appreciating IESF and Shadows of the Valley.

Most of the rest I tend to skip based on placement on the cd: When the River Runs Deep is usually in the rotation, Death or Glory is decidedly not.
 
Mosh said:
TRATB
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Lol, I absolutely forgot this song is here, so throw it in as the third one besides the title track and Eternity - the whoahs are exquisitly dumb, but the instrumental part belongs among my favourite Maiden sections ever - overall a spiritual successor to SSOASS (the song), with the similar vibe of a badly shot boar for the vocal parts, yet Maiden exceeding their typical instrumental prowess in the finale.

Mosh said:
*While I don’t mind acknowledging the undertaking that this song was for the band, I really do feel like a lot of it doesn’t hold up. The piano and fake orchestra sounds are very cheap. The lyrics are great though and I enjoy the song once it picks up and starts to sound like a Maiden song, but it feels more like a proof of concept in retrospect than something that actually holds up.
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I see you're feeling generous.

In general, the second disc feels like a bonus of sorts, you get the absolutely pedestrian melodyless rocker that would be a waste of space as a B-side (Death or Glory), you get possibly the weakest Janick track since he hit his stride on TXF, and sounding like a rehash of past glories to boot (Shadows of the Valley), you get an okay ballad that nobody puts an album on for (Clown), you get the typical latter-day Davey-penned incoherent mess that doesn't hold a candle next to the homonymous Dickinson song (Sorrows) and then you get ... then you get Empire.

Bad piano, bad orchestration, pedestrian musical ideas, a lot of melodrama that I could pardon back then, around the time the man was battling cancer, but in hindsight, it really feels bloated, self-indulgent and "experimental" in exactly the wrong way. Sorry, I know many people love it, because of Bruce and because of the theme (and honestly, although I'm not a huge fan of the lyrics, I do appreciate the topic), but this has all the charm and all the energy of Michael Jordan playing baseball. I mean, I'm happy they're happy, but if they really felt the need "to stretch their muscles", maybe penning it with the help of an outside writer and letting an actual pianist revise it couldn't have hurt.

I like Maiden's turn to moodier and longer songs since TXF, I really do and usually I'm a fan of bloated double albums, because spotty as they might often be, there is something to the band releasing everything it has, the good and the bad, giving you a lot of material to chew on and a journey of sorts (for example, I feel certain catharsis when Attitude and Fixxxer come on at the tail end of Reload). So in general, I'd expect Maiden to be the perfect band to turn to double albums, but here I don't know, it would be much better as a single one.

Eternity
Speed of Light
TGU
TRATB (maybe cut down the whoahs a bit)
River (yes, I am probably the only person on this Earth who likes that track)
Clown
TBOS

Overall, you're aroud 50+ minutes for a single album, maybe throw in Shadows for the guitars if I'm feeling generous and you're something over an hour, which feels the proper amount for this material.

(EDIT: and release Empire as a special digital download EP by "Bruce Dickinson feat. the Iron Maiden", with someone elses's ghostwritten revisions, with the profits going to a cancer fund or something)

But it's really wild it's been ten years already.
 
Diesel 11 said:
What's wrong with the lyrics? They're the best set that Maiden and Bruce have ever had.
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Objectively, nothing; I said I'm not a huge fan, which I feel is completely personal. If we're talking metal lyrics, it's very competent, rather poetic, definitely not embarassing in any way. Also, personal feelings aside, I do respect the lyrics and in general I respect Bruce as a lyricist (my extremely long rants about Starblind notwithstanding).

Nonetheless Empire is much more based on its lyrics, so my usual relationship with Bruce as a lyricist comes extremely to the forefront (unlike Eternity, which is lurid nonsense, but it is so well-hidden in the flow of the song and the captivating music that I wouldn't notice, if it wasn't for the barbed-wire hen).

I just don't vibe with Bruce's lyrics in general, it usually feels overwritten and trying too hard, he uses grand words, but it lacks flow, compared with Tuomas for example, who has this "English-as-a-second-language" overcompensation that I also suffer from, and therefore his poetry is also often clunky and heavy-handed and ridiculously curlicued and ornate, nonetheless it feels more ... alive to me, like he has more fun writing down his stuff.

Bruce penning lyrics to me always has the feel of a corporate CEO taking up painting in his spare time, with some rare outliers like Powerslave (which is also kinda clunky at times, but certain moments are of pure brilliance). He's not a poet, but he oh so wants to be. He does suffer a bit from delusions of eloquence. He is in the uncanny valley to me - too high-brow, attractive and quaint to merely tolerate, but too pedestrian and fake to actually like.

'Arry is much more simplistic, but he writes about his favourite high-brow topics in a simplistic manner, feeling more humble and more tolerable to me, although the lyrics are often of a lower quality than Bruce's in general.

To put it succintly, I'm especially sensitive about the Dunning-Kruger effect in the field of poetry.
 
Agreed. It feels like yesterday. I think TBOS is one of their best/strongest albums as a whole piece (I don't like only 1 song), which is important. It was also the best possible album to follow up on their ''prog'' feel fom the previous one, with more classic (plus instrumental parts, melodies, more solos) and faster material. The longer stuff is some of their best material imo, while the shorter material is underrated. The last 2 albums feel epic, both songs-wise and lyrically (like 2 more from the Reunion). The album also has some different adventures, which is nice for a band like Maiden. Still sounds fresh to me. Reunion era Maiden is my favorite - and this album is definitely Top 2/3.

TBOS is one of those albums that should have been crushingly heavy in terms of production. It would fit.
 
I think all in all I generally still hold the same favorable view of this album as I did when it came out. Nowadays, I think higher of The Man of Sorrows than I did before, and I think lower of Empire of the Clouds than I did before. I guess it evens out.

Almost ten years later, it's not definite if I like this better than The Final Frontier or not. It's a different answer depending on the day and mood. It still makes it #2 or #3 post Brave New World to me.

1. Senjutsu
2. The Book of Souls/The Final Frontier
2. The Book of Souls/The Final Frontier
4. A Matter of Life and Death
5. Dance of Death
 
Empire of the Clouds deserves some love.

If any of you find yourselves on a long journey where music is your main or only source of entertainment, put TBoS on and listen to it in its entirety.

Shhhhh, just listen. Stop thinking about your opinion of it for a minute.

No, no, shhhhhhh. There. You hear it?
 
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