I got deeply into Iron Maiden when I was in middle school, thanks largely to MTV’s Heavy Metal Half Hour (which was sandwiched conveniently between Robotech and Voltron on weekday afternoons) having “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Wasted Years” on heavy rotation. That turned into a decades-long fandom, including a bedroom literally wallpapered with Iron Maiden posters and a “The Trooper” shirt that I wear regularly. I still have all of my Maiden vinyl, from the self-titled through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (which I got the day it came out), including the elusive Maiden Japan.
When No Prayer for the Dying came out with no Adrian Smith and a distinctly different musical direction I lost interest; frankly, Smith’s songs were far and away my favorites, and Janick Gers’ guitar style just fell flat for me. When things got murkier for the band over the next few releases – Bruce Dickinson leaving the band as well, lackluster songs, poor tour attendance, the awful video game tie-in – it really looked like Maiden were effectively done. It was even hard for me to manage more than a cursory curious listen when Bruce and Adrian returned and they topped the UK charts again. It seemed like Iron Maiden were now part of my youth, and that what they really meant were good memories of the 80s.
And where does this nostalgia trip bring us? 35 years on from their debut, and 5 years from their last effort, Iron Maiden have released their 16th studio album The Book of Souls. It happens to be their longest (over 92 minutes) and their first studio double record.
And with all that time and effort, what have they brought us? Well, an Iron Maiden record. To be more precise, they ran the master tapes of The Number of the Beast through Somewhere in Time into a blender, added a bit of piano, a banana, and some cowbell, then turned out the finest Iron Maiden smoothie I’ve ever been handed.
OK, that’s a harsher metaphor than I really needed to use. But The Book of Souls really does play like a re-hash of the best of Maiden. “Shadows of the Valley” has a “Wasted Years”-style intro riff; “The Red and the Black” harkens to the crunchy sections of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; “Death or Glory” revisits the shuffle riff of “22 Acacia Avenue”; “The Man of Sorrows” comes in on rolling chords a la “Children of the Damned”. The lyrics are fixated on souls and the afterworld (and transitions to and from) which is generally true to form for good Maiden songs, though there fails to be any real big, catchy choruses that reach out and grab you. That being said, they carried none of their darkest times with them – this doesn’t sound like Virtual XI, this sounds like a real Iron Maiden record. It’s honestly hard to say more than that about The Book of Souls, with one exception.
The closing epic, “Empire of the Clouds” – clocking in at a whopping 18:03 – adds, in my honest opinion, very little besides length. In its essence “Empire” is a big piano ballad; it’s the story of a tragic airship crash in 1930. Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly good one. There are some moments of nice guitar work in the crunchy middle movement, but not enough to prevent the section from feeling drawn out and wanky (with three lead guitarists and an 18 minute song, you get a LOT of guitar solo….), and the piano bits at the front and back feel more like a bizarro mashup of Meat Loaf and Queen (god rest ye, Freddie). It’s ambitious, to be sure, but it picks up all the wrong pieces from the Lego sets it’s trying to combine.
Final Grade: B. To a real extent you’d be better off just listening to Live After Death, but The Book of Souls is a good option for having old-school Maiden with modern production values. With luck it’ll send the new listeners back to the 80s classics while skipping the 90s tripe. Download “Shadows of the Valley”, Death or Glory”, “The Red and the Black”, and possibly “Speed of Light”. Up the Irons!
Your Shitty Record Won't Review Itself 