Let me tell you a story to chill the bones

Continuing my trip back through the 2003 album charts.

14/09/03 : Dance Of Death - Iron Maiden

Our sixth visit with Iron Maiden - this is going to be the same old, same old, isn't it?

Well, actually - it isn't. It's more like mere rock than metal (with the exception of "Journeyman" which is surprisingly orchestral) - for me it's all a lot more bearable than usual (without being, you know, actually enjoyable) but I'll be interested to see what the critics and the fans thought of it. And that's all I've got to say about it really - except that, as usual, loads of the tracks are too long with nine of the eleven tracks being over five minutes. It's not an album for me, but it's more for me than any of their other albums we've met so far. It's really not a great album cover though (and the original designer agreed because he asked for his name to be taken off the album because they used a butchered version).

We're at #2 with a new entry on the chart this week on the start of a five week run - they tend to enter the chart high and disappear pretty quickly. The rest of the top five were The Darkness, Sean Paul, Eva Cassidy and Cooper Temple Clause (another new entry) and the next highest new entry was The Fun Loving Criminals (#20).

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting (110 milliPeppers) which tells me it's their thirteenth album and features some firsts - "Journeyman" is their first (and so far only) fully acoustic track and "New Frontier" is the first (and so far only) song-writing credit for Nicko McBrain, their drummer - he was driven to write a song about something he felt strongly about, which is, quite obviously, human cloning (he's not a fan - "it's a monster in a test tube").

You really can't fault the band for their ambitious subjects for tracks with them including the fall of a Cathar stronghold during the Albigensian Crusade in 1244, the Battle of Passchendaele, the final scene of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and the media coverage of the Iraq War. To my surprise, the critics liked the album with Kerrang! declaring it to be "stupendous stuff" and it's fair to say the fans also liked it with it making the top three in a load of countries including #1 in Finland, Italy and Sweden - a mere #18 in the US though.

"Customers also listened to" Judas Priest, Megadeth, Dream Theater and Dio - not my cup of tea, thank you very much. As is also true for Iron Maiden, but I found this a lot more bearable than most of their output - maybe it's subtly different or maybe I'm slowly becoming converted to their charms...

07/09/03 - Perplexingly popular
21/09/03 - Average, yet successful