San Antonio 2010
Yet another tour where it’s really unfortunate that we don’t have some official live documentation (that short clip of El Dorado in show #1 from the TFF documentary always makes my mouth water). And, in spite of the backlash from 2006, the band took the opportunity to show that they still believe in the new material. This was the rare Maiden tour where we really didn’t know what to expect going into it. We knew we’d get just the one song from The Final Frontier, the band said at least once that they'd be playing more of their recent material although they never really said how much. Going into the show, I definitely wasn’t expecting a setlist with almost exclusively reunion era songs.
For fans of the reunion era, this was a dream setlist. 4 songs from Brave New World, 3 from Dance of Death, and, depending on which show you saw, 2 or 3 from A Matter of Life and Death. Considering Maiden hadn’t really heavily toured North America for any of these albums other than BNW (and that was 10 years ago by this point), this was probably going to be the first opportunity to hear a lot of these songs live. It definitely was for me. The only reunion era material I got to witness live was what they played on the Give Me Ed Til I’m Dead Tour (and the song Brave New World was excluded from the setlist of the show I saw).
Infamously, there were an unusual amount of setlist adjustments early in the tour. For one thing, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns was played on the very first show and then immediately replaced with Wrathchild. For the first few shows, they also rotated between Dance of Death and Paschendale before dropping Paschendale completely and keeping Dance of Death. Dropping songs early in the tour wasn’t a first for Maiden, but also wasn’t a super common occurrence, rotating songs as a way of testing out the material was very unusual. A lot of people seemed to prefer the setlist of the very first show, in which BTATS and Paschendale were both played. By the end of the tour, folks were seeing Wrathchild and Dance of Death instead.
I have mixed feelings about these decisions. On one hand, it seemed like a really bold choice to go for 11 songs in a row from the 00s era. It was more or less AMOLAD tour 2.0 in that regard. But I also have to say, having seen this tour in person, Wrathchild worked really well where it was. Of course I was bummed not to hear BTATS live (and it’s still one of the few songs that are still on my Maiden bucket list), but I could already feel the energy of the crowd drifting by the end of Ghost of the Navigator. It was a nice bit of relief before the band dug into more deep material. In addition, it seemed critical for audience energy to be high as the band was about to launch into the new song, El Dorado.
As for Paschendale vs Dance of Death, at the time I was pretty bummed that I got Dance of Death as I preferred Paschendale at that point (that’s probably flipped now). But after having heard Paschendale on a lot of the bootlegs (including and especially this show), this song was clearly under-rehearsed and not ready to be played live again. Nowhere near the quality that it was at in 2003/04. Sadly, that probably also means they’re never going to take their chances with that song again.
Either way it’s hard to complain too much about either of these choices as this is still a reunion era heavy setlist and it was great to hear Maiden celebrate this material on a summer amphitheater tour. It’s mostly the obvious choices; singles, songs that had been played live on multiple tours, Harris epics, but they were awesome choices all the same. You get the four best songs from Brave New World, a Dance of Death epic (whether it was Paschendale or Dance of Death, neither song had been played since the original tour), and two of the best songs from AMOLAD. A feast for lovers of these three albums. If I were to nitpick at all, I would’ve swapped Wildest Dreams for Rainmaker.
The Final Frontier
A bass synthesizer and drum machine welcome us into the most unorthodox start to a Maiden album. This all builds into the second half of the first track, The Final Frontier, which is a very conventional Maiden rocker in the vein of Wildest Dreams, Different World, Futureal, and The Wicker Man. The production on the guitars and drums sound the most polished since Brave New World. There are guitar fills overdubbed, an acoustic guitar track layered underneath everything for texture, yet Bruce’s vocals sound dryer than ever. Not only that, but his age is showing in a way that we hadn’t really heard before.
These juxtapositions found in the opening track are the start of a recurring theme throughout the album: old and new, polished studio work mixed with the live unpolished aesthetic of the reunion material. The band’s biggest drift into conventional hard rock mixed with their proggiest material ever. This album has clearly been a difficult one to rank over the years, and it seems to have fallen out of favor among fans recently. It probably also doesn’t help that Maiden hasn’t played any songs from it since the original tour (and I increasingly get the impression that we may never hear another song from it live again). But ultimately I think The Final Frontier’s problem is a sort of opposite of Dance of Death’s problem. Where Dance of Death has a lot of experimentation that was later refined, The Final Frontier (despite its experimentation) doesn’t really feel like Maiden is breaking new ground. I even remember a lot of the initial reviews for the album and reactions to early singles drew comparisons to early material. Starblind has Infinite Dreams vibes, Mother of Mercy is like an AMOLAD leftover, The Talisman feels like it’s picking up where The Legacy leaves off (I remember the first time I listened to the album, my first millisecond reaction to The Talisman was that my MP3 player accidentally went into shuffle mode). There were even stories of When the Wild Wind Blows being a leftover song from the Blaze era that Steve never finished. Indeed, this album does feel like a pastiche of Maiden’s best moments throughout their career. There’s a little bit for everyone and almost every song calls back to an earlier point in their history. Maiden was never a band to vary the formula that much, but this album does look back a little more than usual, especially compared to their last two albums.
And yet, this album feels very fresh even today. It’s extremely progressive, especially toward the back half. Five epics in a row? Yes! Odd time signatures, suspended chords, more complex guitar solos, some thicker arrangements, and very few songs that rely on big repetitive choruses. It’s a dense and challenging album, probably the most of all of Maiden’s catalog even to this day. Satellite 15 is the most unusual thing Maiden has ever put on tape. Isle of Avalon sounds more like a Rush song than a Maiden song. There’s a lot of weird stuff here. Mother of Mercy does feel similar to AMOLAD, but the lush guitar tones and the drum sound makes it very hard to mistake it for an AMOLAD track. The Talisman starts out like The Legacy, but it goes to a very different place.
This sort of tonal dissonance.has made it a hard album to assess. It feels like the band were pulled in different directions here, and maybe for some people the album seems unfocused. Maybe it treads old ground too much, maybe it’s too proggy. Nicko likes to say Maiden is a prog rock band, not a Metal band, I think that is arguable, but this album is definitely the least Metal Maiden album. When it’s not prog rock, it feels more like AOR type hard rock (I’m thinking Coming Home and The Final Frontier specifically). For the first time, it feels like the band is showing their age.
So that’s the meta analysis of the album. I think it’s a fascinating album to talk about, probably because I joined the forum before it came out and I’ve gotten to see public opinion shift in many different directions since then. Also, Maiden has changed a lot since then so the context always changes when I revisit it (and back then we thought it might be the last album!).
I love The Final Frontier. I think it is the second best reunion album after AMOLAD and very much a spiritual successor the way Seventh Son is a successor to Somewhere in Time. I love the atmosphere of the album. Every single song feels like a unique world unto itself. Even the short rockers are very immersive. It feels like they put a lot of great care into the detail, particularly the guitars. Lots of fills, lots of layering, more effects. It feels like Adrian Smith had a lot of influence in that department. The subject matter is incredibly diverse, no two songs deal with the same subject matter. After AMOLAD which was very focused with the lyrical topics, this was very refreshing (funnily enough, now it feels exciting to potentially hear more war themes on Senjutsu). Just like AMOLAD, none of the songs seem like filler and each song stands on its own while also fitting the overall flow of the album. I remember thinking that this would be a great album to play live in its entirety just because of those things. Each song seemed essential and, like AMOLAD, there weren’t really obvious songs to leave off a setlist.
I loved the concept of splitting up the short rockers and the epics. It gives the album a double album-like feel* where each of the two discs have unique qualities. Just like each page of the lyrics booklet has its own color scheme and celestial design, each song has its own vibe and sound. This is probably the most variety you can get on a Maiden album. Also, splitting the album in half that way also makes the short rockers more prominent than they had been on recent albums. People like to say that the rockers aren’t that good anymore, or that Maiden doesn’t spend as much time on them, or whatever else, but on The Final Frontier it feels like they’re emphasized pretty heavily. We’re greeted with 5 of them in a row and, just like the epics, each of them has their own flavor. I love the classic Maiden gallop of El Dorado. How is this song not a classic in the echelon of Two Minutes to Midnight or The Trooper? It fits right in. The Alchemist is to date the last Dickinson/Gers offering and gives a glimpse at what 90s Maiden could’ve been (honestly a whole album of Alchemist like tunes and nothing else would’ve been a classic). Coming Home feels like a third or fourth attempt at a ballad in the vein of Out of the Shadows, Journeyman, or even Como Estais Amigos, and it probably does it the best. The only song I’m not crazy about is the title track, The Final Frontier. I think Satellite 15 is awesome, although I really wish they would’ve fixed that drum loop. But the concept and atmosphere it sets is really cool. The Final Frontier itself feels like a letdown after that, probably the weakest of that style of song.
When the wind sounds of Isle of Avalon fade in, you know you’re in for a feast of epics. Avalon is probably the proggiest Maiden song, the instrumental section feels straight out of a Rush album. Adrian’s guitar jam is awesome. Just like the rockers “side” there’s only one song in this section I don’t care for, The Man Who Would Be King. It feels a little meandering and Bruce sounds a little bored with it. The other songs are all fantastic and any would’ve been the centerpiece if they were the only epic on the album.
Another fantastic quality of the album is the guitar solos. This is possibly my favorite guitar work on a Maiden album. All of Adrian’s solos are incredible, you can hear him doing a lot of new things too. Dave Murray, after a lot of mixed results in the past couple decades, seems to be in a bit of a playing renaissance. There were several solos that were so innovative and creative that I mistook them for Adrian solos at first listen (I’m thinking primarily on the title track and Isle of Avalon). Even Janick’s solos sound really focused and interesting. He doesn’t solo much, but each one is really interesting and feels essential to the album. There was a story about Bruce not being happy with his solo in The Alchemist, honestly I think it’s one of his finest moments.
I can’t gush about this album enough. The way I feel about The Final Frontier is akin to the way many fans adore Somewhere in Time. It feels like a forgotten album in the Maiden canon. You don’t often see it ranked highly among fans and even the band (especially Bruce) seem to write it off in retrospect. I can sort of see where Bruce is coming from. Not that I agree that the album is only “okay.” But, like Somewhere in Time, it’s not Bruce’s best vocal performance (although he has some incredible moments such as The Talisman) and there’s a lot of stuff on here that works better in the studio. We know that Adrian was unhappy about some of the production decisions and you can definitely hear that there were some compromises; this is definitely one of the most “produced” Maiden albums and probably the second most polished after Brave New World. The Book of Souls almost sounds like a demo compared to this one. If this had been the final Maiden album, it would’ve been a great punctuation mark to a great career. Since then, we’ve learned that Maiden actually has a lot more to say and offer.
Maybe that wasn’t apparent while the band was making this album and that’s why what was a strong effort then is seen as only ok now. Still, I think they were clearly in a creative renaissance and some of their best and most interesting ideas are found on this album. It was a punctuation mark to the last ten years, but fortunately not the final frontier for the band.
*As an aside, I’m currently listening to this on vinyl and the sequencing of this really throws me off. Isle of Avalon is presented at the end of side 2 along with Coming Home and The Alchemist. This is the pickiest of nit picks, but I really would’ve preferred they sequenced it this way:
Side 1: The Final Frontier, El Dorado
Side 2: Mother of Mercy, Coming Home, The Alchemist
Side 3: Isle of Avalon, Starblind, The Talisman
Side 4: The Man Who Would Be King, When the Wild Wind Blows
I actually think it would’ve helped with sound quality too. Isle of Avalon and Mother of Mercy both seem pushed a little too far into the center groove.
En Vivo!
Lets start with some general thoughts on the 2011 leg of The Final Frontier tour. I still remember excitedly checking setlist.fm after the first show of the tour to see the new setlist. My reaction? Probably the only time I’ve ever been truly disappointed by a Maiden setlist (granted I didn’t see the 2011 tour, but I’m sure I still would’ve been excited to see a show). Leading up to the tour, I remember bracing myself for what was shaping up to be a less interesting setlist compared to 2010. For one thing, the band seemed slightly less enthusiastic about playing the new material live in interviews, particularly Bruce. I remember one interview in particular where he said the band “might” play a few TFF songs, but it seemed like the focus would be more on classics. After a fantastic setlist in 2010, the bold statement of playing all of AMOLAD in 2006, and the fact that the band had just spent two years doing nothing but the classics, I was hoping that trend would continue on the TFF tour. Instead, we got 5 TFF tracks (the least amount of any reunion album) and a largely “greatest hits” type of setlist. To be fair, they did keep a few of the reunion era songs from 2010, most notably Dance of Death, but overall it felt like an instance of the band trying to play it safe. I don’t want to sound complain-y or entitled like I just came out of the Senjutsu thread, I would’ve been thrilled to see this show live regardless of the setlist, to me it’s more an observation of how much better the setlists have gotten since 2011. I think I mostly would’ve preferred a 6th TFF track, even one of the rockers like The Alchemist. Instead of Two Minutes to Midnight, maybe a song from AMOLAD or even just an 80s deep cut that hadn’t been played as often.
So with that out of the way, lets talk about what we actually got. I’ve never listened to any bootlegs from this tour; I’m not that interested in the setlist so I feel content with the official live release, so I can’t really comment on how the band sounded throughout the tour. With this live album, En Vivo, it seems like they’re trying to recapture the Rock in Rio thing. Big South American crowd, career spanning (sort of) setlist, even the artwork gives huge Rock in Rio vibes. 10 years later, I think this idea kinda backfired and made En Vivo one of the less essential live albums. The first issue is that most of these songs are on Rock in Rio, so they are immediately opening themselves up to direct comparisons between the performances. And there’s just no comparison. None of these songs outdo the Rock in Rio versions, or even come close for that matter. The band doesn’t sound nearly as energetic, in fact Bruce seems pretty tired throughout most of this show. There’s a lot of great crowd noise and the video does a really good job with capturing the larger than life nature of a South American Maiden show, but taking just the performance at face value, it sounds like an average night on the tour.
The TFF songs are definitely the most interesting here, since this is the only place you’re going to hear these songs live. To keep the SIT comparison going, these songs really don’t hit live the way they do in the studio. The Talisman has some cool moments, but there are also a lot of places where it loses steam (and Bruce really struggles on quite a bit of it). Satellite 15 feels a little too awkward as a concert intro tape, too long and just weird, The Final Frontier is about as average a show opener as it is an album opener. I love the way they go right into El Dorado though, I wonder why they didn’t do that on the album? Coming Home works surprisingly well, despite the slow tempo. It feels like Bruce is really into it and it just has a great vibe.
It’s interesting looking back on this album and the TFF tour ten years later. I remember being pretty disenchanted by all of it at the time, although I really enjoyed the live DVD when it came out. Going back to it now, it just seems like one of their weakest live albums. The only reason to listen to this is for the TFF material, but none of the songs are really that good live. Otherwise, why go for En Vivo when you have a much better setlist and performance on Rock in Rio (+ BNW songs work way better on stage, at least in that context). I can see a lot of situations where this marks the beginning of a decline for a band, fortunately something re-energized them since as the tours since TFF 2011 have had more interesting setlists, better performances, and at least with TBOS and Senjutsu the new music seems to be something they’re more excited about these days.
Yet another tour where it’s really unfortunate that we don’t have some official live documentation (that short clip of El Dorado in show #1 from the TFF documentary always makes my mouth water). And, in spite of the backlash from 2006, the band took the opportunity to show that they still believe in the new material. This was the rare Maiden tour where we really didn’t know what to expect going into it. We knew we’d get just the one song from The Final Frontier, the band said at least once that they'd be playing more of their recent material although they never really said how much. Going into the show, I definitely wasn’t expecting a setlist with almost exclusively reunion era songs.
For fans of the reunion era, this was a dream setlist. 4 songs from Brave New World, 3 from Dance of Death, and, depending on which show you saw, 2 or 3 from A Matter of Life and Death. Considering Maiden hadn’t really heavily toured North America for any of these albums other than BNW (and that was 10 years ago by this point), this was probably going to be the first opportunity to hear a lot of these songs live. It definitely was for me. The only reunion era material I got to witness live was what they played on the Give Me Ed Til I’m Dead Tour (and the song Brave New World was excluded from the setlist of the show I saw).
Infamously, there were an unusual amount of setlist adjustments early in the tour. For one thing, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns was played on the very first show and then immediately replaced with Wrathchild. For the first few shows, they also rotated between Dance of Death and Paschendale before dropping Paschendale completely and keeping Dance of Death. Dropping songs early in the tour wasn’t a first for Maiden, but also wasn’t a super common occurrence, rotating songs as a way of testing out the material was very unusual. A lot of people seemed to prefer the setlist of the very first show, in which BTATS and Paschendale were both played. By the end of the tour, folks were seeing Wrathchild and Dance of Death instead.
I have mixed feelings about these decisions. On one hand, it seemed like a really bold choice to go for 11 songs in a row from the 00s era. It was more or less AMOLAD tour 2.0 in that regard. But I also have to say, having seen this tour in person, Wrathchild worked really well where it was. Of course I was bummed not to hear BTATS live (and it’s still one of the few songs that are still on my Maiden bucket list), but I could already feel the energy of the crowd drifting by the end of Ghost of the Navigator. It was a nice bit of relief before the band dug into more deep material. In addition, it seemed critical for audience energy to be high as the band was about to launch into the new song, El Dorado.
As for Paschendale vs Dance of Death, at the time I was pretty bummed that I got Dance of Death as I preferred Paschendale at that point (that’s probably flipped now). But after having heard Paschendale on a lot of the bootlegs (including and especially this show), this song was clearly under-rehearsed and not ready to be played live again. Nowhere near the quality that it was at in 2003/04. Sadly, that probably also means they’re never going to take their chances with that song again.
Either way it’s hard to complain too much about either of these choices as this is still a reunion era heavy setlist and it was great to hear Maiden celebrate this material on a summer amphitheater tour. It’s mostly the obvious choices; singles, songs that had been played live on multiple tours, Harris epics, but they were awesome choices all the same. You get the four best songs from Brave New World, a Dance of Death epic (whether it was Paschendale or Dance of Death, neither song had been played since the original tour), and two of the best songs from AMOLAD. A feast for lovers of these three albums. If I were to nitpick at all, I would’ve swapped Wildest Dreams for Rainmaker.
The Final Frontier
A bass synthesizer and drum machine welcome us into the most unorthodox start to a Maiden album. This all builds into the second half of the first track, The Final Frontier, which is a very conventional Maiden rocker in the vein of Wildest Dreams, Different World, Futureal, and The Wicker Man. The production on the guitars and drums sound the most polished since Brave New World. There are guitar fills overdubbed, an acoustic guitar track layered underneath everything for texture, yet Bruce’s vocals sound dryer than ever. Not only that, but his age is showing in a way that we hadn’t really heard before.
These juxtapositions found in the opening track are the start of a recurring theme throughout the album: old and new, polished studio work mixed with the live unpolished aesthetic of the reunion material. The band’s biggest drift into conventional hard rock mixed with their proggiest material ever. This album has clearly been a difficult one to rank over the years, and it seems to have fallen out of favor among fans recently. It probably also doesn’t help that Maiden hasn’t played any songs from it since the original tour (and I increasingly get the impression that we may never hear another song from it live again). But ultimately I think The Final Frontier’s problem is a sort of opposite of Dance of Death’s problem. Where Dance of Death has a lot of experimentation that was later refined, The Final Frontier (despite its experimentation) doesn’t really feel like Maiden is breaking new ground. I even remember a lot of the initial reviews for the album and reactions to early singles drew comparisons to early material. Starblind has Infinite Dreams vibes, Mother of Mercy is like an AMOLAD leftover, The Talisman feels like it’s picking up where The Legacy leaves off (I remember the first time I listened to the album, my first millisecond reaction to The Talisman was that my MP3 player accidentally went into shuffle mode). There were even stories of When the Wild Wind Blows being a leftover song from the Blaze era that Steve never finished. Indeed, this album does feel like a pastiche of Maiden’s best moments throughout their career. There’s a little bit for everyone and almost every song calls back to an earlier point in their history. Maiden was never a band to vary the formula that much, but this album does look back a little more than usual, especially compared to their last two albums.
And yet, this album feels very fresh even today. It’s extremely progressive, especially toward the back half. Five epics in a row? Yes! Odd time signatures, suspended chords, more complex guitar solos, some thicker arrangements, and very few songs that rely on big repetitive choruses. It’s a dense and challenging album, probably the most of all of Maiden’s catalog even to this day. Satellite 15 is the most unusual thing Maiden has ever put on tape. Isle of Avalon sounds more like a Rush song than a Maiden song. There’s a lot of weird stuff here. Mother of Mercy does feel similar to AMOLAD, but the lush guitar tones and the drum sound makes it very hard to mistake it for an AMOLAD track. The Talisman starts out like The Legacy, but it goes to a very different place.
This sort of tonal dissonance.has made it a hard album to assess. It feels like the band were pulled in different directions here, and maybe for some people the album seems unfocused. Maybe it treads old ground too much, maybe it’s too proggy. Nicko likes to say Maiden is a prog rock band, not a Metal band, I think that is arguable, but this album is definitely the least Metal Maiden album. When it’s not prog rock, it feels more like AOR type hard rock (I’m thinking Coming Home and The Final Frontier specifically). For the first time, it feels like the band is showing their age.
So that’s the meta analysis of the album. I think it’s a fascinating album to talk about, probably because I joined the forum before it came out and I’ve gotten to see public opinion shift in many different directions since then. Also, Maiden has changed a lot since then so the context always changes when I revisit it (and back then we thought it might be the last album!).
I love The Final Frontier. I think it is the second best reunion album after AMOLAD and very much a spiritual successor the way Seventh Son is a successor to Somewhere in Time. I love the atmosphere of the album. Every single song feels like a unique world unto itself. Even the short rockers are very immersive. It feels like they put a lot of great care into the detail, particularly the guitars. Lots of fills, lots of layering, more effects. It feels like Adrian Smith had a lot of influence in that department. The subject matter is incredibly diverse, no two songs deal with the same subject matter. After AMOLAD which was very focused with the lyrical topics, this was very refreshing (funnily enough, now it feels exciting to potentially hear more war themes on Senjutsu). Just like AMOLAD, none of the songs seem like filler and each song stands on its own while also fitting the overall flow of the album. I remember thinking that this would be a great album to play live in its entirety just because of those things. Each song seemed essential and, like AMOLAD, there weren’t really obvious songs to leave off a setlist.
I loved the concept of splitting up the short rockers and the epics. It gives the album a double album-like feel* where each of the two discs have unique qualities. Just like each page of the lyrics booklet has its own color scheme and celestial design, each song has its own vibe and sound. This is probably the most variety you can get on a Maiden album. Also, splitting the album in half that way also makes the short rockers more prominent than they had been on recent albums. People like to say that the rockers aren’t that good anymore, or that Maiden doesn’t spend as much time on them, or whatever else, but on The Final Frontier it feels like they’re emphasized pretty heavily. We’re greeted with 5 of them in a row and, just like the epics, each of them has their own flavor. I love the classic Maiden gallop of El Dorado. How is this song not a classic in the echelon of Two Minutes to Midnight or The Trooper? It fits right in. The Alchemist is to date the last Dickinson/Gers offering and gives a glimpse at what 90s Maiden could’ve been (honestly a whole album of Alchemist like tunes and nothing else would’ve been a classic). Coming Home feels like a third or fourth attempt at a ballad in the vein of Out of the Shadows, Journeyman, or even Como Estais Amigos, and it probably does it the best. The only song I’m not crazy about is the title track, The Final Frontier. I think Satellite 15 is awesome, although I really wish they would’ve fixed that drum loop. But the concept and atmosphere it sets is really cool. The Final Frontier itself feels like a letdown after that, probably the weakest of that style of song.
When the wind sounds of Isle of Avalon fade in, you know you’re in for a feast of epics. Avalon is probably the proggiest Maiden song, the instrumental section feels straight out of a Rush album. Adrian’s guitar jam is awesome. Just like the rockers “side” there’s only one song in this section I don’t care for, The Man Who Would Be King. It feels a little meandering and Bruce sounds a little bored with it. The other songs are all fantastic and any would’ve been the centerpiece if they were the only epic on the album.
Another fantastic quality of the album is the guitar solos. This is possibly my favorite guitar work on a Maiden album. All of Adrian’s solos are incredible, you can hear him doing a lot of new things too. Dave Murray, after a lot of mixed results in the past couple decades, seems to be in a bit of a playing renaissance. There were several solos that were so innovative and creative that I mistook them for Adrian solos at first listen (I’m thinking primarily on the title track and Isle of Avalon). Even Janick’s solos sound really focused and interesting. He doesn’t solo much, but each one is really interesting and feels essential to the album. There was a story about Bruce not being happy with his solo in The Alchemist, honestly I think it’s one of his finest moments.
I can’t gush about this album enough. The way I feel about The Final Frontier is akin to the way many fans adore Somewhere in Time. It feels like a forgotten album in the Maiden canon. You don’t often see it ranked highly among fans and even the band (especially Bruce) seem to write it off in retrospect. I can sort of see where Bruce is coming from. Not that I agree that the album is only “okay.” But, like Somewhere in Time, it’s not Bruce’s best vocal performance (although he has some incredible moments such as The Talisman) and there’s a lot of stuff on here that works better in the studio. We know that Adrian was unhappy about some of the production decisions and you can definitely hear that there were some compromises; this is definitely one of the most “produced” Maiden albums and probably the second most polished after Brave New World. The Book of Souls almost sounds like a demo compared to this one. If this had been the final Maiden album, it would’ve been a great punctuation mark to a great career. Since then, we’ve learned that Maiden actually has a lot more to say and offer.
Maybe that wasn’t apparent while the band was making this album and that’s why what was a strong effort then is seen as only ok now. Still, I think they were clearly in a creative renaissance and some of their best and most interesting ideas are found on this album. It was a punctuation mark to the last ten years, but fortunately not the final frontier for the band.
*As an aside, I’m currently listening to this on vinyl and the sequencing of this really throws me off. Isle of Avalon is presented at the end of side 2 along with Coming Home and The Alchemist. This is the pickiest of nit picks, but I really would’ve preferred they sequenced it this way:
Side 1: The Final Frontier, El Dorado
Side 2: Mother of Mercy, Coming Home, The Alchemist
Side 3: Isle of Avalon, Starblind, The Talisman
Side 4: The Man Who Would Be King, When the Wild Wind Blows
I actually think it would’ve helped with sound quality too. Isle of Avalon and Mother of Mercy both seem pushed a little too far into the center groove.
En Vivo!
Lets start with some general thoughts on the 2011 leg of The Final Frontier tour. I still remember excitedly checking setlist.fm after the first show of the tour to see the new setlist. My reaction? Probably the only time I’ve ever been truly disappointed by a Maiden setlist (granted I didn’t see the 2011 tour, but I’m sure I still would’ve been excited to see a show). Leading up to the tour, I remember bracing myself for what was shaping up to be a less interesting setlist compared to 2010. For one thing, the band seemed slightly less enthusiastic about playing the new material live in interviews, particularly Bruce. I remember one interview in particular where he said the band “might” play a few TFF songs, but it seemed like the focus would be more on classics. After a fantastic setlist in 2010, the bold statement of playing all of AMOLAD in 2006, and the fact that the band had just spent two years doing nothing but the classics, I was hoping that trend would continue on the TFF tour. Instead, we got 5 TFF tracks (the least amount of any reunion album) and a largely “greatest hits” type of setlist. To be fair, they did keep a few of the reunion era songs from 2010, most notably Dance of Death, but overall it felt like an instance of the band trying to play it safe. I don’t want to sound complain-y or entitled like I just came out of the Senjutsu thread, I would’ve been thrilled to see this show live regardless of the setlist, to me it’s more an observation of how much better the setlists have gotten since 2011. I think I mostly would’ve preferred a 6th TFF track, even one of the rockers like The Alchemist. Instead of Two Minutes to Midnight, maybe a song from AMOLAD or even just an 80s deep cut that hadn’t been played as often.
So with that out of the way, lets talk about what we actually got. I’ve never listened to any bootlegs from this tour; I’m not that interested in the setlist so I feel content with the official live release, so I can’t really comment on how the band sounded throughout the tour. With this live album, En Vivo, it seems like they’re trying to recapture the Rock in Rio thing. Big South American crowd, career spanning (sort of) setlist, even the artwork gives huge Rock in Rio vibes. 10 years later, I think this idea kinda backfired and made En Vivo one of the less essential live albums. The first issue is that most of these songs are on Rock in Rio, so they are immediately opening themselves up to direct comparisons between the performances. And there’s just no comparison. None of these songs outdo the Rock in Rio versions, or even come close for that matter. The band doesn’t sound nearly as energetic, in fact Bruce seems pretty tired throughout most of this show. There’s a lot of great crowd noise and the video does a really good job with capturing the larger than life nature of a South American Maiden show, but taking just the performance at face value, it sounds like an average night on the tour.
The TFF songs are definitely the most interesting here, since this is the only place you’re going to hear these songs live. To keep the SIT comparison going, these songs really don’t hit live the way they do in the studio. The Talisman has some cool moments, but there are also a lot of places where it loses steam (and Bruce really struggles on quite a bit of it). Satellite 15 feels a little too awkward as a concert intro tape, too long and just weird, The Final Frontier is about as average a show opener as it is an album opener. I love the way they go right into El Dorado though, I wonder why they didn’t do that on the album? Coming Home works surprisingly well, despite the slow tempo. It feels like Bruce is really into it and it just has a great vibe.
It’s interesting looking back on this album and the TFF tour ten years later. I remember being pretty disenchanted by all of it at the time, although I really enjoyed the live DVD when it came out. Going back to it now, it just seems like one of their weakest live albums. The only reason to listen to this is for the TFF material, but none of the songs are really that good live. Otherwise, why go for En Vivo when you have a much better setlist and performance on Rock in Rio (+ BNW songs work way better on stage, at least in that context). I can see a lot of situations where this marks the beginning of a decline for a band, fortunately something re-energized them since as the tours since TFF 2011 have had more interesting setlists, better performances, and at least with TBOS and Senjutsu the new music seems to be something they’re more excited about these days.
While most of the interesting songs were placed at the first half of the set, I think the energy level got a bit better towards the end. There was bit of a rust, so maybe they managed to shake some of that off along the way.
