Your Maiden blasphemy

A Matter of Life and Death and The Book of Souls are both in my top 5 (#3 and #5 respectively), while The Final Frontier enters my list at #7. Brave New World and Dance of Death are hardly in my top 10 (the latter even less than the former). Meanwhile, the only 90s album to enter my top 10 (at #8) is The X Factor.
 
karljant said:
but if I would get into the band 10 years later no way Virtual XI was going to be one of my favourites! :p
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This, you don't know. ;)
It also has to do with the popularity of the band at that time, I guess (1998 was probably not the time when one may have been urged to discover "this cool band", especially in the US, where Maiden were playing theaters). In 1992-1993, Maiden were actually on French national TV channels and radios (and this must count when you are 11-12 years old).
I had a feeling of being let down a few years after getting into the band too. I had built so much expectatiion for The X Factor -especially since it was the first "new" release from my point of view, after two years of binging on the canon discography- that when I actually got to hear it...well, it made it difficult, though not impossible, to appreciate it right away.
 
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Black Bart said:
I think it has to do with which Maiden albums were deemed popular when you discovered the band. As for me, hardly anything from the reunion tops the 1980-1992 period (I discovered the band in 92-93)... a bit like one may have fondest memories of childhood friends than of adulthood acquaintances (though the latter may be likeable). Anyway, I find this approach more honest and lucid than "rating", sometimes even with decimals (!) since the assessment criteria are subjective.

Anyway, "No More Lies" sucks... :D
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For the most part I am with you on this. However as we move further away from each release time is the cruelest judge. IMO none of the albums after FOTD stood the test of time.

PS: good to be back
 
srfc said:
I listened to the whole thing through there, I wish I could give the post more than 1 like. There's a great part in the 3rd measure of Dave's solo where he plays 1 different note just for the sake of it, amazing subtelty, just one different note that makes all the difference.
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Tons of details in Harris bass lines. He is, after all, one of the greats. There's a hidden triplet in TTAL intro, I'm always unable to predict when it will come. What I remember is that the last bass line of chorus in From Here to Eternity is bloody awesome when separated. There was a FOTD era documentary where Harris actually sits in the studio and records this line, so it's boosted volume up. There I heard it. I'm unable to remember how it was called and find it on YT again.

:)
 
Edington said:
Is it? Outside of this forum is it really held in that high regard?
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Yes, I believe so. I don't remember reading a single Book of Souls review despising it, for example. I recall one which claimed fans would prefer "The Red and the Black" over "Empire", but it still wasn't exactly making little of it. From what I've seen, most seemed to single it out as the highlight of the album.
 
''Fear Of The Dark'' is a very good album. One of my favorite albums from Maiden. Seems to be pretty unpopular opinion here. I think the album topped the charts back in 1992..... #1. It contains 3 not so good songs that are below the band standards, but it has parts in them that are actually great. It is the album that contains the most songs, but I think if the album was 8/9 songs with the other three as a bonus songs or whatever, then it would have been a classic - for me, it is a classic as it is.
 
The biggest problem I have with Fear of the Dark is that it feels more like a compilation album rather than an actual studio album. I think it's the least cohesive album of their career.
 
Black Bart said:
This, you don't know. ;)
It also has to do with the popularity of the band at that time, I guess (1998 was probably not the time when one may have been urged to discover "this cool band", especially in the US, where Maiden were playing theaters). In 1992-1993, Maiden were actually on French national TV channels and radios (and this must count when you are 11-12 years old).
I had a feeling of being let down a few years after getting into the band too. I had built so much expectatiion for The X Factor -especially since it was the first "new" release from my point of view, after two years of binging on the canon discography- that when I actually got to hear it...well, it made it difficult, though not impossible, to appreciate it right away.
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Popularity isn't what makes things good. When I started to listen to Maiden almost nobody liked them. And yes... I was also 11. And yes... there were miles away from the great arena fillers. Back then one thing that made metal METAL was to go against the grain as the mighty Priest would say (there's a curious interview with Opeth's Mikael Aekerfeldt where he points that as the main reason post 80's/mid 90's metal ceased to excite him and therefor he no longer composes metal songs). It was not mandatory but it was implicit (there's great radio friendly metal out there also). I was never phased by it... proof is as far as I'm concerned The X Factor was the record that brought Maiden back. I mean... since NPFTD and FOTD were released way before TXF, featuring the same voice (and let's face it: a way better one!) it was expectable a 19 year older would reject that amount of change. But fact is what made me linger to Maiden was lacking since NPFTD (although in this record you can still find it here and there): the epic tone, the almost progressive format of some tunes, the amazing guitar harmonies, and overall a more aggressive and less hard rock aproach of their sound since I started to listen to the band when acts like Bon Jovi, Whitesnake and Poison were the heavy wheights of "heavy" music. That's how I can easily rank albums like TFF, AMOLAD or DOD on the same latitudes as some of their classics.
 
Number 6 said:
The biggest problem I have with Fear of the Dark is that it feels more like a compilation album rather than an actual studio album. I think it's the least cohesive album of their career.
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This is basically a negative way of expressing a thought I'd been entertaining - Fear of the Dark is probably Maiden's most musically diverse album. It's got a pretty big bandwidth, from power ballad to cock rock (From Here to Eternity, Chains of Misery), pseudo-thrash (Be Quick or Be Dead) and whatever the hell Fear is the Key is supposed to be. It does hurt the flow of the album a bit, and some of the songs, in my opinion, are really not very good, but I think overall, it's a lot more interesting in many ways than most people give it credit for.
 
Perun said:
This is basically a negative way of expressing a thought I'd been entertaining - Fear of the Dark is probably Maiden's most musically diverse album. It's got a pretty big bandwidth, from power ballad to cock rock (From Here to Eternity, Chains of Misery), pseudo-thrash (Be Quick or Be Dead) and whatever the hell Fear is the Key is supposed to be. It does hurt the flow of the album a bit, and some of the songs, in my opinion, are really not very good, but I think overall, it's a lot more interesting in many ways than most people give it credit for.
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That's not exactly what I was going for with my post. An album can be musically diverse and cohesive at the same time (see: The Final Frontier and, to some extent, The Book of Souls). To me, Fear of the Dark fits only the former category.
 
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