The sentient is sent to seek out all the truth

Continuing my trip back through the 2015 album charts.

11/09/15 : The Book Of Souls - Iron Maiden


Our fifth visit with the Maiden (spanning between 1983 and 2019) and my reaction has generally been appreciation of the skill involved and considerably more enjoyment than expected, but a complete inability to differentiate between the tracks - and I have absolutely no expectation that will change here.

Hey - I actually managed to noticed that "The Red And The Black" was different, but only because it's 13:33 long. And then, nearly an hour later, we FINALLY reached the end of "Empire Of The Clouds" which is over EIGHTEEN minutes long. Lordy, that was a slog - ninety minutes all told, but it felt like years. But I have to concede there's plenty of skill there and none of it's hateful - it's just an excess of excess.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week on the start of a surprisingly long eleven week run. The rest of the top five were Jess Glynne, The Weeknd, Sam Smith and Troye Sivan (another new entry - I had no idea he'd been around so long) and we have two more new entries in the top ten for the probably not all that similar Five Finger Death Punch (#6) and A-ha (#8).

Wikipedia has a surprising amount on the album (216 milliPeppers) and it tells me this is their sixteenth album (and penultimate, so far - and all but two have been top ten albums in the UK) and it's their only double album to date. Apart from that, there's remarkably little of interest in there to the casual reader - the critics were generally pretty nice about the album, but they also liked "Empire Of The Clouds", so what do they know? Commercially, I think it's fair to say it fucking rocked, getting to #1 or #2 in THIRTY countries as well as #4 in the US - there are a lot of Maiden fans out there!

"Customers also listened to" Judas Priest, Megadeth, Saxon and Manowar - all my absolute favourites, I can assure you. OK, maybe not - but whilst I'm not a fan of heavy metal, I do have to admire the skill that Iron Maiden bring to the game. I just wish they'd not brought quite so much of it to this particular game though.

04/09/15 - Not as good as I remembered
18/09/15 - Absolutely fine

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