Iron Maiden
The Book Of Souls
(PLG)
More has been written about where the new Iron Maiden will be sold than what it sounds like. But if we’re entering an era where vinyl is for sale in supermarkets (“Staff supervisor to checkout 666, please”) this might, on the surface, seem like an odd trailblazer to slip in beside the organic cereal and quinoa salad: a veteran headbanging band formed in 1975 with 16 studio albums (and at least nine live discs) to their name.
However, you’d be wrong to think that all the good riffs from the heyday of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal were now past their sell-by date. By the time Nico McBrain’s drums roll out at the five-minute mark on opener If Eternity Should Fall, as Steve Harris’s bass takes a tight grip of proceedings and the guitar front line assembles, feet apart, to deliver those genre-trademark twin harmonies, The Book Of Souls has already proved that it’s a far superior beast to any of its peers from recent past or present.
I’ve been to football matches shorter than this double album’s 92-minute duration, but it scores again and again with heavyweight tunes and a skull-and-hellfire vision that’s ambitious and musically dexterous – the flamenco opening and singalong chorus of The Red And The Black, the piano balladry of airship disaster epic Empire Of The Clouds. Great, too, to hear vocalist Bruce Dickinson back after cancer treatment, his distinctive lungful of vibrato as perfectly overwrought as Pavarotti on Nessun Dorma.
Alan Morrison
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