Would you care to take a look or can you read me like a book?
Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts
05/10/86 : Somewhere In Time - Iron Maiden
Our fifth visit with the Maiden and once again, I'm sure I'll be impressed by the skill without enjoying it in the slightest. I'm slightly more predisposed towards them than usual though following the recent death of Paul di'Anno, their original vocalist - he's not on this album though (or on any of the ones I've met so far).
Well, I didn't hate it I guess - but I don't appreciate their love of long tracks. The shortest track is just under five minutes and three of them run over seven minutes - with "Alexander The Great" sounding like an only slightly compressed history lesson at 8:35. It's all pretty much what you'd expect though - if you're a fan then you'll probably love it, but if not there's nothing here to convert you. But you knew that already, didn't you?
We're at #3 with a new entry in the chart this week (Iron Maiden have only had two albums that haven't made the top ten) on the start of a ten week run. The rest of the top five were Paul Simon, Five Star, Madonna and Eurythmics and we have two more new entries in the top ten - South Pacific from Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras (#6) and New Order (#9).
Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting (125 milliPeppers) and it tells us this is their sixth album - they're up to seventeen now and, if I keep going, there's a strong change I'll meet fourteen of them. Apparently the band were knackered from their previous tour (331 days, 187 gigs) and Bruce Dickinson decided the next album needed to be a step change and put forward several acoustic numbers - and the rest of the band decided he'd lost the plot so just ignored him and did what they'd always done.
A LOT of the rest of the entry goes into listing all the Easter eggs in the album cover - and when I say a lot I'm not joking, with 46 separate items listed, some of which go into astonishingly intricate levels of detail. The painting was done by Derek Riggs, the band's artist at the time and took him three months - after which he swore he'd never do anything like that again! The album was well received by those that review this kind of thing (five stars from Kerrang!) and did well commercially, making the top ten in a load countries, including #1 in Finland and #11 in the US.
"Customers also listened to" Dio, Judas Priest, Megadeth and Ozzy Osborne - no surprises there, methinks. It probably won't surprise you to hear that I'm not the man to review Iron Maiden albums, but I have to admit that they do that thing they do well and I have to admire their longevity. However, if you want to know if this any better than any of their others then I'm unable to provide an answer.
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