Norways Really Loves Maiden: Reviews Galore
The Dagbladet review:MONSTER MAIDEN
The fans prayers have been heard. Seven years after Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith rejoined Iron Maiden the bruises from the ghastly 90’s have healed. Finally the creativity between the two and bandleader Steve Harris have come out in full bloom.
The easy going opening track “Different World” is glancing towards 70’s classic hard rock and isn’t really representative for the complex and monumental hour to follow. Even though the song is pretty elementary, Dickinson’s wisely chosen phrasings makes “Different World” the closest Iron Maiden will get to airplay.
FULL ON WAR
From song number two there’s literally full on war. Ass songs on AMOLAD are spun around themes of war politics, political games and the big questions of beliefs and hope. Pompous, yes – but there’s no one who can pull this off like Iron Maiden.
The Brits have taken all their classic elements, modernized parts of their riff palette and packaged them into well functioning progressive solutions that ooze of gunpowder and grandiose battles. Bruce Dickinson sings through great imagery about the blitz of the Hiroshima bomb and the showering bullets that awaited the young kids that were sent ashore at Normandy (the longest day). Rarely have we heard Dickinson so vital and varied.
PERFECT HARMONY
“Brighter than a thousand suns” opens closely reminiscent of a Tool riff and represent the smartest war lyric Iron Maiden ever wrote. At this point everyone’s familiar with Steve Harris’ chord progression, but as long as “For the greater good of God” is the best composition he has written since “Fear of the dark” made soccer stadiums boil in the early 90’s, we forgive the old stubborn. Where Iron Maiden on their latest albums had a tendency to have the songs drag on and on, none of the 72 minutes of AMOLAD feels in excess. All songs harmonizes in relation to each other.
A matter of life and death graces the shelf alongside career moments like “Piece of Mind” and “Seventh son of a Seventh son”
BY TORGRIM OYRE
The Aftenposten one:
ANGRY, OLD MEN
Already deemed a classic by the heavy metal bible Kerrang. Not entirely without reason.
By Asbjorn Bakke for www.aftenposten.no
30 years after the band was founded in the London East End, Iron Maiden are more aggressive than in a long time.
The opening track “different world” is plenty “heavy metal thunder”, a solid rocker that spins threads back to their inspiration Thin Lizzy.
“A matter of life and death” is an album of war and religion without precisely conceptual. These are well known themes to Iron Maiden, and it is the intensity if the performance and the vitality to the compositions more than the lyrics that makes this album convince. Steve Harris’ bass is loud in the mix and the three guitars change between individual flight, united riff attacks and parallel runs.
The apocalyptic “Brighter than a thousand suns” is today’s Maiden at it’s best.
Slow, mellow intro, heavy high pressure riffs, sing along chorus, dead on time changes and pushing tempo changes. A song that crawls as a python on fast forward while Bruce Dickinson alternates between mellow singing and howling franticly at the moon.
With an average song length of over 7 minutes it goes without saying that these metal symphonies are rich and ambitious, but the band manages to land most of them safely.
Kevin Shirley is the producer, as on the previous two albums since the bands abysmal 90’s
The VG review:
IRON MAIDEN: “A matter of life and Death”
Genre: Heavy Metal
Are we talking about Iron Maidens best ever?
I’m willing to say so – we have to travel at least 18 years back in time to find anything comparable (Seventh son of a Seventh Son). Here we meet Iron Maiden on high form, vital and virile, progressive and aggressive, and impressively melodic. The songs – that with one exception exceeds 5 minutes – are classically constructed; time changes between the dark and the aggressive are so frequent both in tempo and intensity that it’s nearly breathtaking for the listener.
The three guitarists move forward behind Bruce Dickinson’s classic metal voice as if they’ve got the reaper at their heels, and carry the melodies into an epic landscape we (as previously mentioned) have to travel more than 18 years back in time to find their equal. The lyrics – centered around the archetypical good and evil, with weight on the before mentioned winning - are so electrifying and dramatically cliché filled as they has to be with the warlords of British heavy metal. Regardless, Iron Maiden might never been closer to the present in their pompous tales of war in general and the use of religion to justify war in particular. Songs like “Brighter than a thousand suns”, where the Iron Maidens create their own new world order, and the massively, militant “The longest Day” is a brilliant read for every “spraklige maksimalister” (dogbreath notes: I have no idea what the writer is saying here)
A matter of life and death is a record so massive that it takes days for it to leave your system. Thankfully.
Recommended buy: Don’t be a douche, buy the whole thing!
By Stein Ostbo, for www.vg.no
The Bergens one is not translated yet.
1 Comment
you guys do a nice work by giving all recent news for the album, bravo____no5