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Iron Maiden: The Final Frontier
Iron Maiden The Final Frontier new music review

Iron Maiden: The Final Frontier

Heavy Metal
4.5/5.0

EMI Records
www.myspace.com/ironmaiden
www.ironmaiden.com
Review: Craig Hartranft,  08.16.2010

Different. Or some say. And some longtime fans may shake their heads and wag their tongues at Iron Maiden's fifteenth studio album, The Final Frontier. Certainly listening to the opening space-prog metal of Satellite 15 one might wonder what's ahead on this platter. But then Maiden bursts into the title cut, and everyone should breath a collective sign of releif. Ahh! Pure Iron Maiden. Or not?

Frankly, I'm not sure what the fuss is here? Undoubtedly, this is Iron Maiden carrying on from 2006's A Matter of Life and Death with more a challenging and complex sound. But I can hear Maiden from those heady days when they were conquering the world with The Trooper, Run to the Hills, Wraithchild, and many more. El Dorado, the first single from the album, is quintessential Iron Maiden, equivalent to any of the older masterpieces. But so also are The Talisman and Isle of Avalon. The difference in this new century may be the greater depth and density in the song composition. Isle of Avalon is a blistering and rich treatise in how Maiden, and classic melodic metal, can turn the progressive trick and still sound both the relevant and themselves. Then once more The Man Who Would Be King will tease your ears with knotty tempos and impressive seque of near metal fusion. But the song of breathtaking deliverance may be the final piece, When the Wild Wind Blows. With its moody, often eerie, complexity from Dickinson's near whisper over a medeval motif to its echoing guitar refrains, this is, again, pure Iron Maiden, yet reinvented and more relevant than ever before. These guys are good, and possibly simply getting better.

Perhaps the statement of a young gal, born late to those mid-Eighties great albums, attending the July 18 Madison Square Garden show might suffice to summarize Iron Maiden's The Final Frontier: '... I appreciate how good they are compared to all the crap out there.'




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In Short

Perhaps the statement of a young gal, born late to those mid-Eighties great albums, attending the July 18 Madison Square Garden show might suffice to summarize Iron Maiden's The Final Frontier: '... I appreciate how good they are compared to all the crap out there.'

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