Your Maiden blasphemy

Can’t remember if I expressed this opinion before, so here goes: I’d like to have had a third album with Blaze. Maybe something in between Virtual XI and BNW. I enjoyed Blaze’s time in the band and felt they (Steve) still needed to find the right musical footing for his voice.
I agree with this. As much as I love Silicon Messiah, it would have been interesting to hear some of his lyrics and ideas from that album on a Maiden album.
 
I may be slaughtered for this but Stare At The Sun is better than any song on BNW or DOD.
What an incredible song! I was listening to the album on my walk today. Born as a Stranger is a cracker as well. The live version from As Live As It Gets is one of my favourite live performances ever.
 
I´m happy to have seen Blaze 3 times live, all top notch performances. The first time (solo that is)was a bit odd though. Very small venue and only 30 people in the crowd..
 
First two Blaze albums are really excellent, it's a shame he didn't hang onto Jeff Singer and continue down the sci-fi concept route of the first two records.
 
Very small venue and only 30 people in the crowd..

Same for me on the two times I saw him, the first time in particular, I could leave my spot on the barrier to go to the bar/toilet and it was still there every time I came back
 
First two Blaze albums are really excellent, it's a shame he didn't hang onto Jeff Singer and continue down the sci-fi concept route of the first two records.
Blood&Belief is great as well. Didn’t like the 2 that came after.
 
Same for me on the two times I saw him, the first time in particular, I could leave my spot on the barrier to go to the bar/toilet and it was still there every time I came back
I stood in front of the stage and Blaze grabbed me during Identity.
 
Can’t remember if I expressed this opinion before, so here goes: I’d like to have had a third album with Blaze. Maybe something in between Virtual XI and BNW. I enjoyed Blaze’s time in the band and felt they (Steve) still needed to find the right musical footing for his voice.
I'm pretty sure that the 3rd Blaze album would have been basically Brave New World. After all, most of the songs were already there, Adrian did not write that much and I'm pretty sure Bruce concentrated mainly on lyrics.
 
No thanks. Two were more than enough.
Don't be a hater. The idea that Blaze was behind any perceived shortcomings in the late 90s is passe and silly, and you know it - he's only one member of the team, and if you think VXI was bad (understandable), and blaming him, then you're really missing the point. It was everyone.

Now, we know that Bruce came back at the right time, not just for the band - but for metal in general.

But still.
 
metal in general
was doing perfectly fine by that time, in my own narrow-minded view, having reached its logical pinnacle, namely the European black metal scene.
Was deeply into it, most of the heavy / power / doom / thrash / death bands I'd been into before that had either screwed up majorly or disbanded, things like Metal Hammer or Rock Hard or Headbangers Ball etc. were no longer interesting at all, and future looked bright. Or dark, depending on your values. Then, a few years later, things started going down the drain all of a sudden. Thought it was job, age, and so on, but thanks to you now I know it was Brucie*, thank you.
*And I'm not surprised at all.
 
It was a combination of things, of course. Blaze’s singing was extremely uneven. Steve Harris was a terrible producer who either didn’t know how to get good performances out of people or wasn’t willing to keep chipping away at it until they got there. Blaze and Janick weren’t particularly great additions to the songwriting bench, and apparently weren’t willing to push back hard enough on Harris’s worst songwriting tendencies the way that Bruce and Adrian often were. All of those things conspired to create lackluster and sometimes downright bad output from that lineup of the band.

Some people apparently love it, and good for them, I guess. That doesn’t mean that the opposing viewpoint is wrong or passé. People can point to objective elements in the music from that period that very specifically explain why they don’t like it, so it’s hard to suggest that their views are unfounded. They just reached a different conclusion than other fans did.
 
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