Artist: Iron Maiden
Album:
Edward The Great(2002 EMI records)
Introduction: Iron Maiden, a heavy metal band, was formed in the early 80's and have produced at least 15 albums for labels including EMI, Sony, Columbia, Epic, and Virgin. They failed to attain major radio play in the US, mainly because of their openly occult material (they have an album titles
Number Of The Beast how could conservative Regan-era middle America not be saturated with them?!?!?), never achieved the success of, say, Judas Priest or Led Zepplin. Never-the-less Maiden has produced an impressive back catalog of heavy metal songs including
The Trooper,
Run To The Hills, and
Fear Of The Dark.
BTW; The album title is refrence to Iron Maiden's mascot "Eddie", a rather corpsified gent, a character whom has no thematic connection to the material (aside from the album cover), at least as far as this compilation is concerned.
Track List
1. Run To The Hills
2. Number Of The Beast
3. Flight Of Icarus
4. The Trooper
5. 2 Minutes To Midnight
6. Wasted Years
7. Can I Play With Madness
8. The Evil That Men Do
9. The Clairvoyant
10. Infinite Dreams
11. Holy Smoke
12. Bring Your Daughter ... To The Slaughter
13. Man On Edge
14. Futureal
15. The Wicker Man
16. Fear Of The Dark (Live cut).
Audio Quality: Awful.
From its horribly cut dynamic range (the opening "satanic chant" from
Number Of The Beast is barely any softer than the songs amplified guitar!) to its "everything dead center" soundstage, it would appear the mixers employed by EMI for this project take a special sadistic delight in making the material as dull and lifeless as possible. Even the drums sound like wooden spoons being pushed into mashed potatos, I honestly couldn't tell the drummer apart from the bassist during most of the material. Seriously, it sounds like a $30 Casio electric keyboard doing all the drum work. The live cut (track 16) seems to have not been re-engineered for suckyness and only serves to whet your appetite for what could have been a very good listening experience overall.
Summary: I like this material. I never had any experience with Maiden before, I think my brother had a
Stranger In A Strange Land T-shirt at one point. I thouroughly enjoyed the music, from Icarus to Infinite Dreams I was impressed with much of the work that Radio & MTV has ignored for years. True Diehard Maiden fans will doubtlessly own all the albums already, making a 'greatest hits' compilation not needed. And for semi-regular fans of Maiden there is the 2 Disc
The Essential Iron Maiden collection issued by Sony records. But this smaller single disc set is good for people looking to get a foot into the door of Maiden's lengthy released material. So while the material is good, I cannot recommend the CD because the sound quality is so damn poor.
