Definitely not missing that, those guys are pretty hilarious.

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

BillyBlastOff
I think "Surf Report" covered the "Trooper" by Maiden if I'm not mistaken. Hats off to those surf bands who take risks.
Dig it.
Beats the hell out of Baja, Penetration, and Walk Don't Run..............

Yep, we sure did. The Secret Samurai still gets people yelling it out at shows. Can't do it w/out the twin guitars though

Ryan
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90

bigtikidude
must have CDs Number of the Beast,
Piece of Mind, and Powerslave.

Jeff(bigtikidude)

To my taste it´s the first album (to be fair to Di Anno) and Powerslave (it´s almost a "greatest hits" package)

Actually, their first SEVEN albums are all worth owning. After that. . . don't bother, unless you're an Iron Maiden completist/freak like I am. (Fear of the Dark has some good moments, though. . . .)

I'm stiff pretty miffed that their U.S. tour was so short.

Vince

Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?!?

mournblade
Actually, their first SEVEN albums are all worth owning. After that. . . don't bother, unless you're an Iron Maiden completist/freak like I am. (Fear of the Dark has some good moments, though. . . .)

Agreed on all the above (Warren's acerbic comment notwithstanding): I like the title track of FOTD quite a bit, as well as "Afraid To Shoot Strangers" and "Fear is the Key" (very Blackmore-esque). "Childhood's End" is very uncharacteristic for them, but I think it's pretty damn cool. And "Wasting Love," despite it being a power ballad, also works. "Be Quick or Be Dead", "Judas My Guide" and "The Fugitive" are all decent, if not exceptional. So, there are some good moments in this album.

My biggest problem with that album is Bruce's singing style, more raspy, pushing his voice into a kind of a Brian-Johnson-like grit, which is a shame, given how awesome his natural voice is. I wonder why he did that? I do think he had overstrained his voice in the previous few years, and on the live recordings of the late '80s and especially early '90s he sounded truly awful. I think he was also bored of that music and needed to do something different like he did with his solo career to recharge his batteries.

Ivan
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In all seriousness, for me the best songs on Fear of the Dark would be eminently skippable filler on anything that came before it. "Be Quick or Be Dead" is half-decent. The intro & chorus for "The Fugitive" are solid. That's about it for me, though.

-Warren

That was excessively violent and completely unnecessary. I loved it.

My first surf band the Sliders did a surf version of Wrathchild in 90.

I recently talked to a friend of mine who did sound for them on their early US tours and said that the first drummer (before Nicko, who credits surf to his influences!) would get so amped up during a tour that a 60 minute set would be 20 minutes by the end of the leg.

Jeff Utterback

Ruhar
My fav. track so far is Tower, with it's Murders in the Rue Morgue bassline.

One of the songs on Accident of Birth did the same thing with part of the "Wrathchild" bassline, which I thought was pretty cool.

-Warren

That was excessively violent and completely unnecessary. I loved it.

Ruhar
Yet another reason to revive this thread!
I finally got around to picking up Bruce Dickinson's Chemical Wedding album based on Ivan's recommendations. Yeah, it is indeed a killer album.

Excellent, Ryan! Glad you got it. It's an amazing album.

I like it better than Accident of Birth actually as I think it has a more timeless sound to it.

It's always pretty close for me, but I think I slightly prefer AoB. There are sooo many killer songs on that one, Taking the Queen, Darkside of Aquarius, Road to Hell, Man of Sorrows, AoB, Omega, Arc of Space. TCW has a phenomenal unified quality that is truly epic, but I don't think there are as many great individual songs as on AoB - though the song The Chemical Wedding is probably my single favorite Dickinson track ever.

I also picked up the Skunkworks and could barely make my way through it. So I can't recommend that one unless you're a completeist.

I would say that it's better than you paint it here. It was a big experiment for Bruce. He was feeling really boxed in and constrained by metal by the end of his initial residency in Maiden (so, the early nineties in particular), and his solo career was an attempt to break out of that box. Balls to Picasso, his first post-Maiden solo album, was an experimental Frankenstein that I don't think ultimately works, and it was followed by Skunkworks. Bruce was trying to sound contemporary, which at that time meant going for a grunge sound, and the influence of the Smashing Pumpkins is quite obvious, too (well, it was '96, they were a great band at that time). Anyway, I think Skunkworks also ultimately fails, but there are some great songs on there: Back From the Edge, Solar Confiment, Headswitch, Innerspace, Strange Death in Paradise. Check out those, and see if they grow on you a bit. (Back from the Edge was the song that really made me want to check out Bruce's solo stuff back around '02 - it's got a fantastic video, too - check it out on YouTube.)

After the commercial failure of both of these albums, Bruce was basically in the process of giving up on the music industry. He became a pilot and was pursuing other projects. It was Roy Z (who played on Balls to Picasso) that implored him to make a full-on metal album, which Bruce didn't want to do. Roy persuaded him to just come over for one night and check out a few songs that Roy had - that was enough to sell Bruce and it was the beginning of AoB, as well as ultimately Bruce's return to the Maiden fold. Steve Harris must have noticed that Bruce's albums were getting a lot more critical acclaim than the awful Maiden albums of that era, and that the band was losing its audience. In a way, I'm kind disappointed about Bruce's return to Maiden, since Bruce's band during that '97-'99 era was really incredible, in many ways better than Maiden. AoB and TCW were certainly more creative albums than anything Maiden had done since '88, including their last three. But I'm sure Bruce's and Adrian's bank accounts are doing MUCH better....

Ivan
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Ruhar
Yeah, I'll definitely give it some more listens. It just didn't grab me initially

Here's the Back To the Edge video.

I could agree with this until the release of A Matter of Life and Death. I think that album is very strong and proves that the band is indeed still relavant today. Most of the material is a bit on the proggy side, but I think they really make it work well.

I like the album quite a bit, but I don't think it's nearly as good as AoB or TCW. The last 3 albums really emphasize the proggy thing, and it wears on me sometimes. I like the shorter, faster, straight-to-the-point songs, and they've been in bit of short supply with Maiden lately. But I've actually enjoyed all three albums quite a bit.

This album actually renewed my interest in the band quite a bit (although seeing them during the Brave New World tour with Dio and Motorhead was a near religious experience for me )

That would be the Dance of Death tour, not Brave New World. 2004, right? I saw them on the same tour. GREAT show! By all three bands, actually, but Maiden were definitely the stars.

Ivan
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Ruhar
Yes, the 2004 tour. I'm sure you're right, however I don't recall them playing anything off of Dance of Death (but I definitely could be mistaken about that as I'm not very familiar with that album).

Actually, now that I think about it, the tour was right before the release of the album (like by a few weeks or so), so they only played Wildest Dreams off of Dance of Death. It was a kind of a 'classics' tour, designed for the American audiences which then tended to see the band more as a nostalgia thing rather than a vital creative force, but they did do a couple of BNW songs, too.

Ivan
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