IRON MAIDEN — Iron Maiden (review)

IRON MAIDEN — Iron Maiden album cover Album · 1980 · NWoBHM Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Pekka
As with most bands who start their career and develop their songcraft by playing the local clubs for many years, Iron Maiden's debut album is much like a Best of the Early Years collection. On the other hand main songsmith Steve Harris was a big prog fan and on the other hand when you start hitting the London rock scene in 1976 and carry on for the rest of the 70s, you can't really avoid being influenced by punk. This album is the collision ground of two opposite influences and the end product is something pretty original.

Among the punkier material of the album is the rocking opener Prowler and the in my opinion far lesser problem-child-on-the-lam anthem Running Free with its tom tom beat very unusual for Maiden, and with current pressings the album also includes Sanctuary, originally released as a single and also put on the U.S. release at the time. This is the pressing I've grown familiar with, but I'm reviewing the original, thus leaving out my least favourite track of the album. The album's rarity and perhaps the least well known song is the only Maiden song ever solely penned by Dave Murray, Charlotte the Harlot, a kind of a Maiden-lite metal track about a man crying over a prostituting loved one. Charlotte would of course return later in 22 Acacia Avenue and be name checked in From Here to Eternity over a decade later, but her first appearance is an overlooked little gem of early Maiden.

Other highlights of the album are the half-ballad Remember Tomorrow, later covered by such humble groups of fans as Opeth and Metallica and the proto prog metal epic Phantom of the Opera, no matter if Paul Di'Anno has trouble pronouncing every word Steve Harris had crammed into the verses, this is a great example of their dawning sense of dynamics. Strange World is an untypical maiden song in its beautiful calmness, perhaps only matched by the acoustic Journeyman recorded decades later and of course there's their first instrumental Transylvania and the ever present set closer, title track Iron Maiden, fine pieces of metal both.

An extremely respectable debut by one of my biggest favourites ever, but as they revised their line up and developed their sound, things would get much much better in coming years.
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