IRON MAIDEN

The roots of Punk Metal? I dunno, I hate punk but I love this! Overall Rating: 13 Best Song: It's like, a tie between PROWLERS and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

Man! What a damn introduction! Why can't more debuts be so gratuitously good? If the few studio releases that followed this sucker weren't so groovy, I'd have very little problem calling this thing 'all the Iron Maiden you need', even if something like that's totally retarded as a notion. As overrated as Number of the Beast is, this sucker makes up for in in how underrated it is, even if, like the notion before it, the notion of anything being underrated from Iron Maiden is just silly. Folks love this stuff!

And for now, I do, too. Most people who compare this and her twin sister KILLERS to the NUMBERS-PIECE-POWERSLAVE era usually remark: Well, they were finding their sound. Well, they were learning to fly. Well, they were too rough, raw, and unprofessional. And the ever popular: Well, they were just some shitty punk metal band with a drunken lout as a singer. Those folks all have violent ear disorders. Not only is this one of the most energetic and 'fresh' records they (er well, Steve Harris) ever proposed, it's also the one with the, dare I say it, best sense of sheer melody. Sure, they might not be as emotive and obvious as sir Brucey's titanuim crooning, but under the dirty haze is a real sense of melody.

Oh, so many tasty riffs. The wah-wah-whayawawa from Prowlers always tears through my li'l chest. This is also one of the least predictable metal records, in how it totally captures that raucous "late night lunatic" atmosphere. It's as if they crafted a concept album about some violent, murderous, raping, mentally frigged whack hound killin' prostitutes (ahem, women of the evening), and drinking wine-filled blood under the shimmering moon. Maybe the softness of Remember Tomorrow is a little off-putting, but when it builds, it builds!

Is it me, or is Phantom of the Opera the best 'prog' song they ever did? I should've guessed! With all sorts of dancing riffs and jams, it absolutely justifies the seven and a half minute running time. Maybe my only real gripe with the thing is how it too often relies on the generic metal riff fills to keep a song going. Ideally, and I mean ideally, they should have cut most of these tracks in half, and it'd be a 30 minute metal opus...

*****

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