Went through Maiden England and No Prayer for the Dying the last two days. Maiden England is a release I haven't paid enough attention to. It's a really good performance, really good setlist (with little that is duplicative of Live After Death—just four songs) and has a very enthusiastic crowd. I enjoyed it a lot.
No Prayer for the Dying remains an album that I mostly enjoy on its own terms, but definitely think of as one of their weakest albums and a huge step backward from Seventh Son. What struck me this time is how much two of the better songs, the title track and Mother Russia, have in common with two of the best songs on Seventh Son, Infinite Dreams and the title track. Maiden, of course, are no strangers to repeating ideas, and it never really detracts from my enjoyment of a song as such, but compared to a lot of their repetitions, it doesn't feel like there's a lot that's new and interesting here. In fact, NPftD and MR sort of just feel like lesser versions of ID and SSoaSS. So there's a strange dynamic on this album where a lot of the songs feel very self-consciously stripped back and rougher, and then a couple of songs just feel like pale imitations of what they did on the previous album.
Of course, NPftD also has a few of their weakest songs. Besides the one about female offspring and the one about devices used to suspend objects in midair, I think The Assassin is notably weak. The verses are pretty good, and I started out this time feeling like I might have misjudged it, but oh that chorus is a major miss.
Topic: The Iron Maiden Thread v. The Merge of Souls (Read 573246 times)
