Ah, here it comes. The album only two people in the world seem to not like: Bruce Dickinson, and me.
And by "not liking it" I don't mean that I think it sucks, or that it's a bad album, or anything like that. It's just that... you know with all the beautiful models and actresses there are in the world, all of them being pretty beyond belief, and maybe there's someone everyone drools over but you can't figure out why? you'd never say she's ugly, 'cause she obviously isn't, but you'd never pick her out of other equally beautiful women and everyone else instead insist that she's so hot? well, same with me with Somewhere in Time, it's still a classic Maiden album but I never warmed up to it.
Sometimes with music it's all about feel, the spark, the elusive magic that happens... well, I don't feel it with SIT. With Bruce MIA, I'd say Adrian Smith saved the album for me, his three songs are excellent. Wasted Years is a memorable classic, Stranger is so unique and groovy (pity by the time I saw them in the reunion 1999 tour, it had already been dropped) and Sea of Madness is quite memorable.
Steve Harris' songs are great, sure, but he seemed to have fun to strain Bruce having him spitting out a hundred words per second, see Heaven Can Wait and Loneliness' verses, and I agree that the repetiveness is starting to appear here. For the record I'm not particularly crazy over Heaven Can Wait, but I like a lot the "Take my hand" part that precedes the stage invasion.
Caught Somewhere in Time is quite good - as glorious as it was to hear Moonchild live with the acoustic intro in the Somewhere Back in Time tour, this song would have been a more fitting encore opener. And Alex the Great is nice, sure, but many fans today are still stuck on this song because it was never played live - I'm sure if it got played in the tour, people wouldn't insist to this day that they have to perform it.
Ironically, while Somewhere in Time fails to conquer me wholly and out of the classic Bruce albums is very easily my least favorites, it wins me on two other things: the cover art, righteously praised for its complexity and cleverness, and the B-Sides.
Somewhere in Time has the best collection of b-sides of the '80s. Reach Out is golden with Bruce coming in during the chorus, That Girl and Juanita are both good cover songs - the first serious, the second more fun, and The Sheriff of Huddersfield is absolutely hilarious, it's a song mocking Rod Smallwood's moving to the USA and the band managed to get help from the record company to keep it hidden from him until it was released
A "listen with Nicko" session revealed that Rod was pissed at it in the beginning but eventually came to accept the joke.
I'll join in the congratulations for these write ups. I consider myself a quite knowledgeable Maiden fan so it's not that I read many stuff I don't know, but to read it presented in such a clear and nice way it's a great trip down the memory lane