Now to be fair, I feel I need to point out that I think Maiden have overused this dogfight motif: we've had “Aces high”, “Tailgunner” and now this, and to be fair again, the latter was kind of a rewrite of the former. Still, it's a good rocker and after some pretty extended tracks it's nice to just headbang and forget about everything.
But I can't, can I? Because the opening riff sounds like it's borrowed directly from “Losfer words” off
Powerslave, though that does fade out as the song gets going, this time an ode to the famous Manfred von Richthofen, the World War I fighter ace known as The Red Baron. At least the lyric is pretty simple and straightforward, and given that this is Dickinson and Smith combining again, it's nice to see we don't get the confusing narrative we saw in “Speed of light”. Yeah, it's good fun and it's one of the things Maiden do really well. I just hope it's the end of the fighter plane songs, as it's wearing a little thin now.
Harris reasserts his grip over the songwriting, collaborating with Janick Gers on the next one, Adrian and then Dave, but he must feel ashamed that the opening riff is “Wasted years” and then the main melody again steals from “Seventh son”, so that “Shadow of the valley” is really more an amalgam of older songs with a few new bits thrown in. Is this about the Charge of the Light Brigade? Didn't they do that on “The Trooper”? It's a good enough song, but it's so derivative that it's almost embarrassing. The lyric don't inspire either:
”Ask them the questions/ Tell them no lies”. Really, guys? That's the best you could come up with? I don't want to dampen the enthusiasm for this album, but I definitely have to point out some really poor decisions and some sticking points, and this is one of them, this cobbled-together mess of other songs that drags on for over seven minutes. Oh, and throw in a few “Whoa-oh-oh-oh”s while you're at it, why don't ye?
Better is “Tears of a clown”, with its references to depression and specifically to Robin Williams, (though he's never mentioned the band have confirmed he was the inspiration for the song, or at least his suicide earlier this year was) and its slower pace and darker tone. It's interesting to see a metal band, particular one of Maiden's calibre and standing, attempt to take on the touchy subject of depression and suicide, but I feel they do a very good job with it, and as much as I've slagged him off on most of his songs, credit must go here to Harris and also to Adrian Smith for managing to write a touching and yet not sentimental or sugary tribute to one of the world's best and most missed comedians. I think he would have approved. A soft, wailing guitar opens “The man of sorrows”, and I immediately did a double take. Didn't Bruce have a song called almost this, minus the definite article, on his third solo album,
Accident of Birth? It's not the same song, but it's odd that they would title it as such. It's a dark, moody grinder, perhaps one of many songs on this album showing how the age of the bandmembers is affecting them and turning their thoughts to themes of mortality and death. It's a good song, but it's quite bleak and it fades out in a way I don't usually expect Maiden songs to.
And then, there's the elephant in the room. No metalhead can at this point be unaware that this album closes with Maiden's longest ever song (if you are, were you not paying attention earlier? I mentioned it at least twice) and that it's a solo Dickinson penned number. Most of you also know that it opens mostly on piano (which has been up to now unheard of for Iron Maiden; I don't think they've ever even used piano before) and is about the R101 disaster. But in all the reviews I've read (and I've read many in preparation for writing my own) nobody has bothered to explain what the R101 disaster was. Well, I will. If you want to skip it and get to my dissection of the track itself, feel free.
R100 and R101 (the “R” presumably referring to “royal”) were two competing airship projects, one government driven, the other privately funded, and at the time it flew, 1929, R101 was the largest airborne object ever built --- 731 feet long --- and flew a full seven years before the famous
Hindenburg, whose crash was to dominate world news in 1936. Eager to make a crossing from England to Karachi, the airship took off on October 4 1930 and after experiencing bad weather and with the crew either misdiagnosing or ignoring several problems, crashed in a field near Beauvais in France almost eight hours later. 48 of the 54 passengers and crew were killed, including almost all the development team, and the crash brought to a halt forever Britain's attempts to enter the airship business.
That's the short version: you can get the full story here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R101#Final_flight
As for the song, well as already mentioned over and over, its' Maiden's longest ever by a long way, clocking in at an impressive eighteen minutes and five seconds, a length that would even raise the odd eyebrow on a progressive rock album, never mind a metal one, and “Empire of the clouds” opens on Bruce Dickinson's recently-won piano, (a strange sound on a metal album to be sure) with scant accompaniment from the band, plus violin, and runs for about two minutes before the vocal comes in. It's slow and stately, grand and majestic, no doubt seeking to represent the gliding, sailing giant of the skies as it made its unhurried progress across the sky. Bruce's vocal is in fact here one of the best I've heard from him; maybe it's because this song is entirely his baby. He wrote it, he plays the piano, and it seems he guarded it jealously, playing his piano in a glass box and only letting the guys in on the melody once he was finished with.
As we reach the fifth minute, the urgency begins to propel the song along in a faster rhythm, Bruce snarling
”We must go now, for the politicians/ She can't be late.” The guitars of Adrian, Dave and Janick now begin to assert themselves a little more, and as trouble shows its head there's a salvo of riffs and heavy drumming from Nicko before an almost triumphant passage from --- I don't know; how do you know who's playing what solo? Anyway, it's very melodic but gets much more intense and powerful as we head into the eighth minute, the piano now faded long away, the tempo picking up on the back of the three guitars, Harris's thumping bass and Nicko's romping drumwork.
Some truly exceptional solos taking the song into its twelfth minute as the pace increases even more, Bruce coming back in with the vocal, the sense of panic and realisation that they are about to crash asserting itself in the faster, heavier guitar work and Bruce's wailing vocal. The piano returns in the fourteenth minute with a spiralling solo of pure fear and panic as the guitars hammer down around it and the airship falls helplessly from the night sky, plummeting down towards the forest. Then it all slows again as Bruce returns to the melody from the opening section, presiding over the wreckage of what should have been Britain's triumph, her finest hour, her dominance of the air, dreams all shattered now, as broken as the bones of those who fell from the sky, as dead as the corpses that now litter a French field, far from home.
Plaintively, he wails
”Dreams live on!” before accompanying himelf on the piano as he pays his final respects to the dead:
”Now a shadow on a hill, the angel of the east/ The empire of the clouds may rest in peace/ And in a country churchyard, laid head to the mast/ Eight and forty souls who came to die in France .” The song has something of a low-key ending, which I guess you would expect when it's such a sad and tragic tale, but somehow it feels to me like there's no real payoff at the end, as it kind of just drifts away on the piano notes. I doubt that will bother most fans though, and this should go down a storm (sorry) onstage when they perform it later in the year.
TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS
Disc 1
1. If eternity should fail
2. Speed of light
3. The great unknown
4. The red and the black
5. When the river runs deep
6. The Book of Souls
Disc 2
7. Death or glory
8. Shadow of the valley
9. Tears of a clown
10. The man of sorrows
11. Empire of the clouds
I will admit I'm slightly torn here. This is a fantastic Maiden album, there's little doubt about that, but is it, as many have perhaps overhyped it, the best Maiden album ever? No, not a chance. There's never going to be another
Powerslave. Is it the best of the post-Bayley era? I don't think so; I still believe that, song for song, track for track,
Brave New World holds that title. But is it the best since after that? Well, as I already admitted, I have not listened to the last three albums as much as I should, so I can probably not make that determination, but from what I have heard of them, I would have to say this is streets ahead. Put it this way: it's the first Maiden album since
Brave New World that has made me want to listen to it again.
There's no doubt that after an absence of five years and considering the scare Bruce had, that this would be greeted with open arms and an almost determination to love and praise it. And it does deserve love and praise. But the kind of messianic rhetoric that is sprinkled through most reviews I've read is I think slightly overdone. It's a great album, but it has its flaws. Some of the songs are unnecessarily long. There are recycled tunes, melodies, solos, ideas. It's a lot to sit through, especially for a review. Maiden were obviously happy with all the tracks and didn't want to drop any, thus the double album, but I could have left out two or three here and still had a pretty damn decent single album.
But in the end, it's great to see Bruce back, and recovered, and it's great as ever to welcome Iron Maiden back after so long.
The Book of Souls is not a perfect album by any means, and take with a large grain of sodium chloride any comment that it is, but it's certainly one of the better things they've done since 2000, and going back before that, probably since
Powerslave or
Seventh Son. That's an achievement in itself. And of course, this is their sixteenth album in a career now spanning over thirty-five years, so you can't expect miracles.
This is about as close as you're likely to get, though.