[ Review ] IRON MAIDEN - THE BOOK OF SOULS (2015)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 3/10 [ Bad ]

One of the UK metal bands that epitomized '80s - '90s NWOHM style. NWOHM is a mixture of Heavy Metal and Progressive Metal. How to balance, weight and transform these two styles into an effective formula is extremely crucial. Where most of the Iron Maiden's releases seemed a little overwhelmed by their trademarked repetittive guitar hooks and riffs (sometimes those riffs and hooks can be repeated for more than 10-20 times in a track), is nevertheless considered quite pleasant, neccessary, effective, smooth and well blended during their heyday.

I finally decided to write something here after receiving many negative feedbacks about this album. Yes and No, not to say Book Of Souls is a horrible album by any means. In fact there is a very BIG surprise on this album. The first 30 secs of the intro on the first track was jabbing me hard ! I was telling myself, "Holy shit, this album is not going to be the same anymore, the guitar-trio is giving us a very clear sign that Iron Maiden has changed their musical direction, they're going to be more and more into progressive metal style in the future".

Under my expection, the guitar team of Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers really brought a new dimension to make this band into a New Iron Maiden. They play more complex progressive guitars now, absolutely impeccable, nearly perfect. It really showed their skills could still KILL despite their 4-5 years layoff between studio albums. Better than before, even can be considered having their peak performance in the guitar works in the whole Iron Maiden's career. This album turned out to be the group's most experimental album up to this point. 
(** Be warned, metal newbies might need to take extra time to appreciate the guitar works as said the guitar works are less commercial and simple but more complex and artistic now...).

Now, the problem is... too much revelling in playing progressive guitars (yes, way too much, nearly 80% - 90%) inducing paying very very less attention on the vocal-melodies. Bruce Dickinson's singing becomes redundant, even sounds bland. He is not to blame as all the problems came from the problematic song-writting, all the tracks are extremely boring, totally not melodic and fully unmatched. I really don't understand how could Bruce Dickinson agree and tolerate such a tasteless song writing/ vocal melody (By the way, I haven't checked if Bruce involved in song-writing, if the answer is positive then he is one of the culprits to destroy this album, ha...ha...). Finally, I would like to say I enjoyed the progressive approach very much but the song writing is definitely bad to the core, that is the main reason why I couldn't rate this album high due to the major downfall of the balance of music.