"This Christmas marks 40 years since bass player Steve Harris formed the band; it’s more than 30 years since the albums on which their reputation really rests appeared: 'The Number of the Beast', 'Piece of Mind', 'Powerslave'. And yet during the past decade, their albums have become ever more challenging and knotty. If they haven’t exactly confounded their fans with a diversion into glitch-hop, their inclinations towards prog-rock have become more pronounced, their songs lengthier and more epic, a willingness to take risks more noticeable: not many artists who’ve sold 85m records are prepared to release an album without having it mastered because they want a raw sound...
Their 16th studio album continues the trend. The succinct and punchy single 'Speed of Light' turns out to be a decoy. There are other tracks here that point to the band’s roots as leading lights of the new wave of British heavy metal, which instilled a punchy concision into metal – among them 'Death or Glory' and 'Tears of a Clown', the latter a gloomy meditation on the suicide of Robin Williams...
Harris’s 'The Red and the Black'... cleaves more to the model of how artists of Iron Maiden’s vintage are supposed to behave: its 14 minutes don’t do anything the band hasn’t already done, and contains a nod to 1983’s 'The Flight of Icarus'. It feels familiar but, crucially, it doesn’t sound like a band coasting, a difficult trick to achieve. There’s a genuine urgency and agility about 'The Red and the Black' and, indeed, almost everything here. As is inevitable on a 92-minute long album, there are a couple of longueurs, not least the lumbering 'Shadows of the Valley', but for the most part, 'The Book of Souls' is marked by a impressive rawness that scratches against the album’s more grandiloquent moments. The title track’s theatricality never tips in kitschy self-parody. On paper, opener 'If Eternity Should Fall' looks a bit daft and overblown: almost nine minutes long, it features portentous synthesizers, an episodic structure, acoustic interludes and a spoken word coda that begins with Dickinson bellowing “I AM NECROPOLIS!” and gets progressively less subtle and understated from thereoin. But in reality, it rages gleefully and propulsively along.
It’s a bit dewy-eyed and romantic to suggest, as some reviewers have, that the rough spirit of Iron Maiden’s days slogging around London’s pubs still clings to them 85m album sales later, not least because two-thirds of the musicians on 'The Book of Souls' weren’t in Iron Maiden when they were slogging around those pubs. But nor does the album feel like something produced by a group of multi-millionaires on the verge of celebrating their ruby jubilee, cruising towards retirement: on the evidence of 'The Book of Souls', The Acceptance of the Inevitable isn’t on Iron Maiden’s agenda." - The Guardian
Double Compact Disc
Tracklisting
CD1:
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
CD2:
1. Death Or Glory
2. Shadows Of The Valley
3. Tears Of A Clown
4. The Man Of Sorrows
5. Empire Of The Clouds
