DiAnno Maiden is cool but just doesn't hit that same level of grandiose epicness that I love from the Dickinson era, and if I'm being honest that's why I like the band in the first place. I generally don't like "gritty, hard rock-infused" NWOBHM unless it's got something extra going for it.

Dickinson Maiden is pretty much my favorite heavy metal music out there. I get why it would seem sugary if you really love the old, underground 80s stuff that you guys love (and I do too, don't get me wrong) - but it doesn't come off that way to me in the least and I never get tired of albums like SIT or Seventh Son, which I basically consider some of the best metal you can find, just pure class, style and grace.

That's fair, but for me a lot of the epic-ness just feels like a cartoon for small children. Well-made and everything but it's just not for me.

"Class, style, and grace," are like the three least appropriate words for metal Some shit still hits for me though. "Hallowed Be Thy Name" of course, and odd tracks like "Sea of Madness" and "Flash of the Blade".

Eh, it all depends. Some metal really benefits from those adjectives. As with everything, context is king. I like Dickinson Maiden because they do something that almost no other NWOBHM does, but I can find plenty of the other bands in the raw and heavy styles.

I figured someone would say that but frankly, I just don't see it that way - if they describe a band and it works, then eh. I consider those albums basically unparalleled in metal and I am familiar with many of the more underground ones praised here. There's nothing else like them and I do not see them as cartoony or childish or sugary, etc. In terms of songwriting, inventiveness, hooks, etc I find them flawless.

One band to me that commits to a perfect marriage of style and grace but also rawness and heaviness is Satan (UK). Love that shit. Helstar is also in that conversation, especially with Vampiro, my god that fucking album slays.

Yeah, Sea of Madness is a really great track that people seem to skip over a lot when talking about SIT.

Shit, it's one of my favorites of any IM song. The similarly titled Sea of Lies from Symphony-X is great too. Is there a pattern here, any other good "Sea of X" songs?

YES PLEASE

I'm with you though man. I'm sure we've talked about it before. The Iron Maiden s/t album could have come out in 1984 and it would still sound completely in-line with the times. It's mind-boggling. I love it so so fucking much.

I bet you guys think AC/DC was better with Bon Scott, too.


Also here's a pre-emptive "Relax, it's a joke. Don't think I'm hating on DiAnno Maiden."

You should really learn to stop posting stupid shit on the internet. Bragging about how much this girl wanted to fuck you like your some sort of hero for getting your dick played with. Say stupid shit on the Internet people will respond.

I kinda just don't listen to AC/DC ever. They rule I just...don't. I get my fix for that sound from early Accept and Krokus' Headhunter!

Di'Anno's Maiden is good, but Maiden with Dickinson has reached epic proportions that Di'Anno's stuff could never touch.

Favourite Maiden album? Eh I dunno. I more or less agree with the old saying "Iron Maiden are a band that makes great songs, not great albums". Their albums always have a couple of tracks that are fillerish and/or not so great compared to the rest. Many people love Powerslave, but be serious, do you really love the middle part of it? The Duellists and Back in the Village are quite skippable songs, imo. And like I've said before, I'm not a big Aces High fan.

Btw, I find 7th Son overrated. Ofc it's a good album but I'd rather listen to Somewhere in Time all the way through from the beginning to the end. I just love those synths and its sci-fi theme. Wasted Years isn't really my favourite Maiden radio track, but it's alright. Sea of madness KICKS ASS. And Heaven Can Wait is also pretty great. And Stranger in a Strange Land is a very overlooked maiden track. That track just has an aura about it that seems to take you to another world. As for Alexander the Great... it's probably my least favourite Maiden final album epic next to Fear of the Dark. Not that it's bad, mind you.

Number of the Beast? The first 3 tracks together make an awesome combination. And ofc no need to even say anything about the title track and Hallowed Be Thy Name. They speak for themselves. Run to the Hills... not a bad song but it's way overplayed. It's probably top 5 in the "most well known Iron maiden songs" list and it doesn't really deserve that much notoriety as far as I'm concerned. Gangland? Fillerish track. Total Eclipse? That wasn't even part of the original album, so I don't really count it. But it added nothing to the album.


Well actually.. AC/DC were not as repetitive as they became after Scott died. But I find that band hella overrated. I mean, I don't even hate AC/DC and like several of their songs and Back in Black is a classic album and all but the way people praise them as if they're the best band ever is ridiculous. Hell even the band itself is sorta self-aware and admits they're not exactly the most technically gifted musicians out there and just want to have fun.

AC/DC only became iconic after Johnson joined, though, and most of their hits are with him. That's my point. I wasn't even trying to talk about whether anyone liked them or if they were good or bad or overrated. I don't even care about all that.

Oh well that is an obvious fact. If the band had died with Bon Scott I'd probably still haven't heard of them. Although wasn't Highway to Hell, Scott's last album iirc, already a big success?

Yes and no? The thing is, that would absolutely be 100% true if we omit Back in Black. Everything with Brian Johnson after BiB is very hit-and-miss, where an album will have a few good tracks and a bunch of totally forgettable ones. The Bon Scott albums start out a little rocky but get better as they go and peak with the last few, which are amazing, but BiB is pretty much the peak of their musicianship, and of course as a metalhead I love the darker tone that album has compared to just about any other AC/DC album - my official answer has always been BiB and the Bon Scott stuff is equally great.

SO FUCK YOU

FUCK YOU MORE

Gangland is one of Iron Maiden's best songs ever.

The middle is what sparked my love for Maiden in the first place. I heard Flash of the Blade one day and everything clicked. The Duellists and Back in the Village each add up to be some of my absolute favorite songs from them too. The musicianship on those is just phenomenal. I initially did not like The Duellists due to its chorus, but that somehow mended itself as I find myself liking that part a lot now. I'm sure I don't have to mention the lead breaks on that song. Goodness fudge man those lead breaks.

Hey man for what it's worth I watched a few of your bass covers at work yesterday and really dug them. I've been getting myself "psyched up" to buy an instrument for a few years now and it's always inspiring to see someone who has a blast playing. I don't want to be good I just want to be able to play all the riffs from Sad Wings of Destiny.

Well, I must say that just made my entire day! I throw a few on the sig because why not, but I didn't think anyone would really enjoy 'em like that. Especially since I'm just a kid who does it for fun. Thanks very much, seriously!

That's specifically why I liked it! Just a dude in his room rocking out. I watched part of Powerslave and then I really enjoyed a Sabbath cover, was it Hole in the Sky? It has a sharp ending and you were way into the groove. I need to stop being a bitch and learn to play.

The Duelists is definitely weak, but I'm really surprised people dislike Back in the Village - that's a great song as far as I'm concerned. I DON'T HAVE A NUMBER, I'M A NAME!

I've been having one of the worst episodes of back pain I've had in the past decade. It started already before Christmas as a mild annoyance, but it's been pretty shitty for the past week. The muscle relaxants I've been prescribed are effective, but I tend to get all sorts of side effects from pretty much anything these days, and they are usually quite amusing for everybody else. Sirdalud gave me tics all over my body for two days, and not only did I wink constantly to everybody, I also got heavy jolts in my buttocks, upper arms, and even my bloody love handles. It also provides me with pretty weird dreams, though, and this time the most awesome one involved a huge band on a stage, wearing helmets that only left the left lower quadrants of their faces visible, and capes made of green circuit boards; all this with the awesomesetest light show EVER. One of the dreams had me climbing a huge steel lattice supporting the roof of a plane hangar, fearing for my life. Also, the dreams are surprisingly physical experiences. Which brings me to my completely unrelated point:

Bolt Thrower is awesome.

Damn dude, that's a bummer about the back pain but you might want to ferret away a few of those pills in case you want to have a magical trip to dreamland on demand later? That sounds like a lot of fun (except the climbing FUCK heights)!

Can someone please make this into a death metal song? Thanks.

You should see the haematomas in them after gigs with especially heavy bass sound. Resonance, man, resonance!

I like how you keep calling your hallucinations "dreams". You're tripping balls, dude.

I listened to Dickinson Maiden so much throughout my teens that these days most of their stuff has the 'Stairway to Heaven' effect on me - I will always revere it because it's badass work but I don't listen to it for personal enjoyment anymore. That's not to stay I still don't lose my shit if I'm out and boozed up and Number of the Beast comes on. The Dianno stuff I've come to appreciate more, can't say it really holds a candle to the Bruce stuff but it's more interesting to hear these days than the rest of it. Overall, my favorite Maiden is Powerslave, my favorite Priest is Sad Wings, but Sabbath crushes em both because I still listen to Sabbath all the time. Sabotage baby.

Also, heard Varathron for the first time yesterday. Didn't know what I was listening to at first but it was scratching that Thy Mighty Contract itch - turned out to be His Majesty at the Swamp. It's not a perfect album but one of those ones where the faults kind of make it better if you know what I mean. Has a nice trve kvlt flavor to it, solid fucking riffs with a few great ones scattered in. Need to check out this band more.

Make sure to check out Untrodden Corridors of Hades - really interesting take on hellenic bm with good atmosphere and lots of riffs.

Listening to it now, tasty as hell.

Man, I miss being 18 and listening to Maiden's, Metallica's Megadeth's, Priest's etc. classics for the first times and being blown away by it. And I don't mean just metal but also some rock classics such as Zeppelin's and hell, I even was a big GNR fan for a while.

Man, I remember being in the car with my dad when I was 14 and hearing Kashmir for the first time, it completely blew my mind and you could tell my dad was excited about my interest in one of his old favorite bands.

Btw, do edgy hipsters still accuse people under 40 who listen to Led Zeppelin and Queen of liking "dad rock"?

In general, I don't get into this trend of shortening album titles to their initials. "Back in Black" coming out as "BIB", illustrates why Having a quite good album like "Somewhere in Time" reduced to "SIT" is anti-climactic as well.

It's just faster/easier to type, man. We also do that with video game titles. I've seen Zelda fans doing this for over a decade now.

I bet lots of people have memories like this, and I do too! My dad was never much into Zeppelin or Sabbath, being a little more of a southern boy. But I remember being in the car with him when I was around 11 and he told me he had a new "best Of" by Creedence Clearwater Revival. At the time I was mostly listening to extremely violent hip hop. I remember asking him "Revival, like they're a Christian group?" and he just kind of chuckled and then fucked my whole world up with that delicious swamp music.

Maiden has always been more of a song band than an album band for me, on the whole - Dickinson-era particularly. Seventh Son is really the only Dickinson album I can sit through all the way through, and even then it can get tiring with "Can I Play with Madness," "Infinite Dreams," and the ad nauseam chorus repetition on the title track. Seriously, by 5 minutes into "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" I just want to yell at Bruce to shut the fuck up and end the song already. Di'anno era definitely seems superior as a whole, and I'd say the s/t currently holds the place as my favorite Maiden album. Dickinson-era has higher highs; nothing in Di'Anno era quite reaches the grandeur of "Caught Somewhere in Time" or "The Evil that Men Do" for me, but the songwriting on the first two albums was so tight and consistent, every Dickinson album feels way too bloated (some more than others), and there's just filler abounding, at least to me. I do love Dickinson as a singer, but man, I just find myself bored so easily trying to sit through an entire album these days.

Good stuff! The Greeks do melodic black metal right, where the melody actually comes from the guitars. I find too much melodic black metal is just the same black metal guitar-wise, with a keyboard tossed in. Varathron's "Aclo Savaoth Soth"... goddamn, that riff is how it's done!

You can pretty much substitute Frank Zappa for Zeppelin, and that would be my experience. Good times.