I listened to the album twice this morning and it's got a lot of 90's in it. I don't like at all giving conscious comparisons, but The Final Frontier is crystal clear the album that should've followed Seventh Son Of a Seventh Son; its production is brilliant, even better than BNW production, which I love. While listening to it on my stereo, this morning, I started with TMWWBK and went to 25 on volume, when the distored guitars entered it didn't cracked the sound, then I threw it to 27, then 28, and when I finished the album it was on volume 30. And it's no coincidence I got all the first pressing to the rest of the discography; when I used to listen to the remasters or when I listen to BNW, DOD or AMOLAD on volume mark of 30, it gets unbearably cracking and it turns into a sonic mass that kills all the dynamics. The Final Frontier has no loudness war at all and it's the most Birch approached sound captured after Fear Of The Dark, but not like FOTD, TFF has more to do with SIT and SSOASS (much of that due to going to the Compass Point studios, where the good old vibes certainly worked strongly to add to the album's vibe).
Onto the music again, Coming Home takes me back to the beginning of the 90's as its chorus construction is so linked to the big Metal ballads of the 90's, which was the era when the Metal ballads really came to the front and dominated charts worldwide; Starblind has so much Sabbath in there but Maiden didn't borrowed any riffs from Sabbath, instead, they captured the 'Sabbathical' vibe and made it unmistakeably Maiden style; The Alchemist is straight from the power metal vibe and style from the 90's, leaded by Helloween and it's the first time I see Maiden nodding to a band that were - even if a little - influenced by themselves! All that said, it still brings the new vibe of the present day. I'm really not sure why the people who doesn't like it are so negative about the album as it's another classic album; I'd say the problem is the time of release and the mindset of most people now have about what is Heavy Metal. The way TFF is being received with the negative comments reminds me a lot when SIT and SSOASS were released and I got reviews here from the time in which one says that SIT is a slip in the band's career and the three Smith composed songs were badly written and very poor! One from SSOASS says the band went 'pop with a lot of Duran Duran and new wave like synths and melodies' and that it didn't seem the great Iron Maiden anymore. Although I dislike AMOLAD for its most part, the sequence of albums Maiden released since 2000 is as classic as the sequence from POM up to SSOASS, the only difference is that back there, they didn't released a monochromatic and unidimensional record as AMOLAD, but apart from that, Maiden remains strong, creative, powerful and second to none.
As Rush said on an old song - The more things change, the more they stay the same.
