No beef at all, just curious how you were viewing it.
If brave new world, dance of death and a Matter of life and Death were their first three albums every note of every song would be bowed upon. Yes I do love all of these albums today but you get my point?!
I strongly disagree. Wickerman, Brave New World, Blood Brothers, Mercenary, Dream of Mirrors, Out of the Silent Planet, No More Lies, Monstsegur, Longest Day, FTGGOG etc have choruses that go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and I don’t think every note would have been worshipped. Early Maiden had all that useless fat stripped away.
Yes, I pretty much agree with this. In the countdown thread it has been stated that someone prefers the more epic, progressive Maiden (referring to the reunion era) than an album like TNoTB. I guess where I sit you can't get a Maiden track more epic and progressive than Children of the Dammed (complete with repeated chorus lyrics) and the song is 4 and a half minutes long. So many of the reunion songs are just too long without earning their excessive length.
As the person who stated that, I'd first like to be clear that I was not referring exclusively to the reunion era. I was referring to an aspect of their sound that was dominant on SiT and SSoaSS and every album from 1995 to present, played a major role on PoM and
Powerslave, and played a minor role on every other album.
Children of the Damned is a good song, but it was never in the running for my top 75. I also don't see it as particularly progressive by Maiden's standards. It's a change of pace in that it has more of a ballad feel at the beginning and builds up to an interesting bridge, but that doesn't strike me as unusually ambitious unless your bar is
Killers.
In the case of that song, I also think the lyrics are a real barrier for me. I just do not want to hear about a child dying horribly, period. That's a general barrier to my enjoyment of the first three albums and NPftD. The sexual lyrics (which continued long enough to occupy one of the best songs, musically, on TNotB) kind of disgust me and the horror lyrics range from boring me (The Number of the Beast) to repelling me (Children of the Damned). The crime lyrics (most of
Killers) are interesting at times, but not as much as the history, literature, etc. stuff they did more of later. There are exceptions on those first three albums, but those are the dominant themes.
And as for those 10 songs that are supposedly so badly drawn out, I'll just say that well over half of them are on my list, some of them quite high, precisely in most cases because they are doing things that I find ambitious, progressive and interesting.
Topic: The Iron Maiden Thread v. The Merge of Souls (Read 573402 times)
