The Book of Souls: General album discussion

Every successive listen to this album confirms my initial opinion that it is easily the best reunion album. One thing I particularly appreciate after listening to TFF is how much better this feels mixed. There are several songs on TFF which feel like they'd be much better if they were mixed differently (namely TMWWBK which I enjoy a lot anyway, and Starblind which I don't but think I would if it were mixed differently) which is a problem I don't think TBOS is suffering from.

My progression of the songs thus far:

Gains:
- Speed Of Light: This song gets better every time, I swear. Can't believe I was a bit iffy when it was released as a single.
- The Great Unknown: Started out quite disappointing, grown on me a bit though.
- The Red And The Black: Again, better with every listen.
- The Book Of Souls: one of the bigger growers. Not top 5 but that is just a comment on the quality of the album overall.
- Death Or Glory: prechorus was always catchy, the rest of the song is catching up.
- Shadows Of The Valley: biggest gainer so far. Went from "not bad" to my 2nd favourite song on the album. Just overall brilliant.
- The Man Of Sorrows: turns out I was wrong, this isn't godawful like I thought. Hopefully it continues to grow.

Static:
- Empire: came out of it thinking it was the best Maiden song ever; opinion hasn't changed.

Thus WTRRD, TOAC and IESF are the losers, though this is more a comment of the rest of the album catching up so they no longer seem as special. Still great songs one and all.

I hope it continues this way.
 
Sorry to "complain" and thank you for all of your work, but do we have an idea on when the ironmaidencommentary.com will be updated on TBOS? I love this album. It's an instant classic, but I haven't been going to work this past week and that's when I listen to my music uninterrupted. I'll "dive into" this album more deeply this upcoming week.
Literally every single song is good. That hasn't happened IMO since Somewhere in Time.
 
I have an extremely hard time comparing this album to the rest, simply based on the fact on how they went about recording it. The different approach definitely created a unique album in terms of rawness and flaws which I find kind of cool. Metalsucks called it "endearing" which I agree with. We can debate production and which songs do what for who until we're dead but the energy within the album is what surprised me the most. It feels urgent and to the point, which is astonishing considering the length. And I say this while not including EOTC. That still leaves a TFF runtime of 70 minutes.

About EOTC...not feeling it. Love the ambition and that they gave it a go but it's too much and a little silly in parts. It really is an isolated Maiden song. SOTV and MOS are also off my playlist. Bruce is way too up front on MOS and SOTV just doesn't stick.

The rest? I'm good. TRATB is a fun song. I don't give a shit if they solo for hours at the end. I don't feel like listening to a Maiden jam is somehow this ridiculous thing. Is the structure the best? Nope. Is it the best Harris epic? Nope. Do you want to hear Maiden guitarists? OK, thanks. Basically, all of disk one and parts of disk two is all I need.
 
Interesting tidbit, according to that recent Nicko video, this guy standing next to Eddie:

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is Necropolis, the shaman from the first song.
 
The artwork makes more sense on the vinyl. If you open it out you see that all the artwork from the different pages of the other formats all fits together in a great big triptych.
 
It is a bit funny that the Eddie getting to the altar on the SOL video is different to the one above. One might say that we are talking about a different time and space (get it?)...but still.
 
Do it! Do it! But wait, how would you call the rest of your band then?!
 
This album can be pretty cinematic at times I think. Especially the title track and Empire of the Clouds. Definitely a side of Maiden I'd love to hear more of.
 
Very much so in Empire. It's cinema, rather than theatre, old style cinema at that. The instrumental bits could accompany black and white newsreel, and not just that little piano part as the ship falls from the sky.

Edit: Guillaume Tell Studio is a former cinema and very much still looks like one. The atmosphere of the place is a good match to Empire of the Clouds.
 
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Definitely mentioned in another thread, but I now have the Deluxe CD and with it a high quality digital version of the audio.

I bring this up because having just listened to Disc 1, I'm very impressed by the difference between it and the 128kbps MP3 files I had before. Either it's a fantastic placebo or there are a lot of subtleties that are very easy to miss with lower quality audio.

I think IESF is the biggest example of this. There are multiple echoes in the intro that I missed every time in the MP3, the guitar in the verse is no longer a pleasant whir but a distinct riff, and the killer is the spoken outro where I had never noticed there were 3 voices speaking.

All the tracks so far have benefitted (IESF, TGU and TBOS the most, SOL probably least) but in general I feel like I'm listening to an album with a lot more texture now, and it's bumping an album I already rated highly further up my list.
 
Christ. I've only heard the CD, but if it's miles better than the leak then God help anyone who listened to it.
 
Caveman Ninja said:
Christ. I've only heard the CD, but if it's miles better than the leak then God help anyone who listened to it.
Click to expand...

I take it from this you weren't impressed even by the CD?

Speaking as a non-audiophile who listens to music pretty much exclusively through reasonably cheap (£10) headphones off his phone, I enjoyed the production to begin with. The mixing meant the singing sounds a lot stronger to me here than on the previous two records, and the main hooks are all still there. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's miles better but it is definitely more nuanced than I thought.

Obviously this is highly track dependent. Of Disc 1 I felt that IESF had several "oh that's neat" moments, SOL felt largely the same (except riffs underneath solos being more disinguishable; this is a universal thing though), TGU felt better textured just generally, can't remember specifics for TRATB (lyrics a bit clearer? Not sure if this is just because I had a brief read of the lyric book), WTRRD felt improved due to more noticeable backing vocals in the final chorus, and TBOS felt much better - due to the little orchestral flourishes in the chorus being more noticeable and due to the solo underneath the bit past 9 minutes being audible here.

Can't comment on Disc 2 until I listen again, which I'm now off to do.
 
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