Iron Maiden - Brave New World

All you naysayers out there who accuse the legendary Iron Maiden of inconsistency, are about to get a cold, harsh slap of reality in your faces, for while the band may have faltered on their road to and past utter mediocrity at one point in time (namely 'Fear of the Dark' acting as something of a bump in an otherwise perfectly diagonal downward quality slope), it is now but all too clear that the band flat out refuses to be associated with anything other than a sinking ship, and will do all in its power to make certain that if its dying flame will go out anytime soon, it will not do so without having left behind a most vile and putrid stench.............

Ah yes, the harsh, bitter, dripping sarcasm; cynicism up the wazoo; why, it could only mean that a new Maiden album is out. Let us all take a moment to rejoice and give thanks...... Now then......

I suppose it would really be a rather pointless exercise in frustration to try and reason out all the mammoth hype and jarring anticipation surrounding 'Brave New World.' After all, 'Virtual XI' (the 1998 gem by the same band) was largely considered, in my most subtle phrasing, a really really REALLY awful album, so quite naturally a follow-up would (or should?) be a timeless classic. Right? Er...

Let's take a slight step back in time and have ourselves an all-encompassing look at the last five years of Maiden's by now problematic (oh, let's face it - PATHETIC) existence. Part of the problem was of course Blaze Bayley. The ex-Wolfsbane singer's voice was overall jarringly inept and completely out of tune with the music, so naturally having become the scapegoat in the ordeal - the bitter, paltry mess that it was - most people failed to see that the real problem lay not with Bayley's incompetence as a singer, but in fact with Steve Harris's songwriting impotence. So yes, Blaze may now be gone and Bruce may now be back, but that other, BIGGER problem is still very much intact.

I'll make the remainder as short and sweet as I can. There's just no room for subtleties here; the songwriting is, in short, total shit. The only 'progress' (and I'd recommend taking the word with a hearty grain of salt) from 'Virtual XI' that I could detect was that the aggravating repetition and redundancy that dominated a generally large portion of the aforementioned album has now infested every track, usually several times per each song. Musically it is the very same, dull, meandering, go-nowhere, sterile mess that 'Virtual XI' was generally comprised of, except now even longer and more erratic, entirely devoid of even the slightest attempt at 'catchiness', melody, interest, prominence, emotion, et al.

Furthermore, Bruce's otherwise terrific pipes are totally wasted here, as the vocal lines seem to be ripped straight out of the previous two albums, one moreso than the other (care to take a stab at which one?) - on just about every song I was waiting for Blaze to start crooning away as only he can, and was almost always caught off guard when he didn't. So, in what I could at best chalk up to an apparent attempt on the part of the band to make up for such a shocking deficiency, the vocal lines are generally as equally dull as the music, save for those occasional places where they are even worse...and they are, needless to say, also quite forced (thereby definitely in sync with the music, but I hope by now you get the idea how that's not necessarily a good thing.......)

Highlights? That's a good one. Still, all taken into consideration, I suppose "Nomad," with its decent level of crunch and a fairly convincing Arabian vibe, would be something of a saving grace, the only saving grace, mind you; what would have been a decent-to-solid song on a better album, here by far outshines the piddling crap of its 'surroundings' such-as-but-not-limited-to "Blood Brothers," "The Thin Line Between Love and Hate," and "Out of the Silent Planet" - the latter being an absolute new low for the band.......