Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Iron Maiden
Label: EMI Records
Released: 2010
Runtime: 76:37
Rating: 4.5/5
The new Iron Maiden and their 15th studio album bring a final dividing line. Is this really the band’s farewell and requiem, or just the start of a new era? A band that has seen pretty much everything. A band that, alongside Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, had a decisive influence on how modern metal developed and got defined. Pioneers that everyone bows to, without exception.
“The Final Frontier” really is a kind of milestone in their career. You might be surprised, but since Dickinson returned to his standard spot in the band, this feels like the fourth album in a row, and the most convincing one, in what Iron Maiden have been trying to tell the world since “Brave New World” (2000). If “Brave New World” was the album of the resurrection of the classic Iron Maiden image, hinting at where the road would lead next, then “Dance Of Death” (2003) and “A Matter Of Life And Death” (2006) confirmed the adventure into the band’s still unexplored and undiscovered musical territory. Whenever we go back to those previous two albums, there’s no way to fault their quality. With them, Iron Maiden proved they stay interesting even in the mature years of their musical career. But “The Final Frontier” sums up these “journeys” of the band into uncharted fields more effectively than anything so far.
If Maiden were previously still wrestling with the dilemma of how many of the typical traits defining this band’s musical identity they have to keep, and how many they can sacrifice for the sake of widening their expressive range, then “The Final Frontier” is the album on which Iron Maiden have matured in that respect too. The album manages to capture every trait of the Iron Maiden sound the band has been developing on its records from 1980 right up to today, while at the same time Maiden managed to work in elements that surprise enormously with their freshness and unusual combinations, which means only one thing. They’ve offered something new and different! And “unusual” here reaches back to a flirtation with the teenage years of the band members. The roots of the “pre-Maiden” era!
Roots in the sense of musical growing up on the albums that marked the band members’ youth. If you grow up on records put out by such interesting bands (of pioneering origin) as Nektar, Argent or Stray, it’s hard to go wrong in that regard. As long as you keep doing things your own way, of course. And Steve Harris, thank God, still knows that all too well! The arrangements on the songs are, one and all, demanding. They combine lots of motifs, lots of tempo turns, lots of moods. Nothing new for Maiden, you’ll say. But the banal effect of easily digestible and consequently forgettable songs like Wildest Dreams has been completely removed on the new release! That’s already one of the things the band managed to achieve on this album, and one you’ll be very grateful for, since it’ll help you see this is one of the best albums of the band’s post-“The X Factor” era. The other important observation is that you won’t suffer through multiple repetitions of choruses anywhere. That’s in the past. Here, the arrangements are exceptionally dynamic, and it’s all notched into the song structure.
The album surprises with the very opening of the title track. Almost tribal rhythms pound in the spirit of desperate panic, blasting us straight onto an alien planet. There you wait, as one of the last members of a human colony, for the final showdown with an alien race. It’s not hard to find yourself on the deck of a spaceship in the middle of crossfire lasers. The guitar pattern is reminiscent of alarming wailing sirens, and before us unfolds the black scenario of a last battle, a close encounter of the third kind. Then Bruce suddenly joins in, deepening this theater with his vocals. After four and a half minutes there’s a pause. The band cuts shockingly onward with an actually trivial rocker riff, while the listener is still on the first song, Sattelite 15… The Final Frontier! We can immediately feel an extraordinary looseness at this point on the album. No baggage from past works, no baggage from the expectations and demands of fans who always want nothing but a “Trooper”-style galloping riff! Can we talk about an upgrade of The Reincarnation Of Benjamin Breeg from the previous album? After that retro rocker riff in the verse, certainly. The pompously shaped melody brings out the traditional Maiden face for the first time in the chorus. An incredibly fresh and unpredictable turn of events right at the start. As shocking as the opening of the song is, its ending is no less surprising. Maiden stop a note early. It’s an “unfinished” ending. That’s followed by El Dorado, which opens the way bands generally use in classic closing numbers, exactly the kind that’s deliberately missing from Sattelite 15… The Final Frontier. El Dorado is the most predictable song on the album, yet not for a moment can we pin on it that feeling of idiotically trivial minimalism that liked to cling to the opening track of the last album, or the one before. The band keeps using a riff that’s closer to the findings of the classic hard rock school than to metal, but underlays it with The Trooper gallop and so steers the listener away from “petty and unimportant remarks”. Despite the observation that the songs are demandingly built, El Dorado is the quickest-to-win-you-over moment on the album.
Now the album is only starting to lift off and develop into a real treat. From here on, Iron Maiden manage to ideally blend the traits of the classic definition of their music with the “new” face. So there’s the introduction of classic tricks like perfectly executed harmonies in thirds with a whiff of eternal Celtic melancholy, Harris’s tearing bass lines (the accentuated “treble” effect won’t let you down this time either), the typical unique transitions of Nicko McBrain’s always wittily animated rhythmic foundation, and Bruce Dickinson’s epically shaped lead choruses, whose performance once again fully justifies the “Air Raid” label.
And what else makes this album so interesting? More than ever, you can feel the workings of the Dickinson-Smith songwriting partnership, which evokes certain feelings carried onto this album (intentionally or not) from Dickinson’s best solo studio achievements (“Accident Of Birth”, “Chemical Wedding”). Yes. Never mind that Harris, as the last in line, always stamps his boss’s “approved” on the written material before it lands on every new Maiden CD. It’s very welcome and likable. Even before we put the CD in the player, we’re exposed to this witty touch. One of the new songs carries the same title as a song from Dickinson’s solo album “Chemical Wedding” (The Alchemist). Regardless of the fact that there was no looking back at or (God forbid!) deliberate leaning on Dickinson’s solo works in the search for inspiration for the new material, the thing is simply so energetically interwoven that it pushes to express itself on its own, completely spontaneously.
That feeling already echoes in the first part of the album, in the song Coming Home. The verse of this song is underlaid with picked clean chords that gently revive the energy of Dickinson’s works such as Chemical Wedding, Book Of Thel or The Alchemist. This feeling is deepened by Smith’s soloing later on and the instrumental middle section.
Iron Maiden’s new song The Alchemist has only this much in common with Dickinson’s: it’s sung by the same singer. In it, Janick Gers also flags his songwriting for the first time. The song carries a rhythm taken from the “Blaze Bayley era”, embodied by a song like Man On The Edge. Especially in the verse. This sped-up number reaches its pompous peak in the chorus, of course, which Maiden masterfully expand by raising the tragic, melancholic atmosphere with the help of recognizable Celtic harmonies.
One of the most beautifully conceived songs on the new album is undoubtedly Isle Of Avalon. It carries an acoustic foundation, leaning heavily on Harris’s bass lines, which as they deepen revive the magic of the album “Seventh Son Of a Seventh Son”, especially those calm, atmospheric passages of the title track of that classic Maiden album. Isle Of Avalon is also a herald of the expressively stronger and more convincing second half of the new Iron Maiden album. This song is also the only moment where Steve Harris “pushes” his bass lines into the intro of a song. On “The Final Frontier” those parts are almost entirely the domain of the guitarists! Next comes Starblind, which in places again underlines the feel of “Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son”.
Starblind is a track in which the guys back the guitars with a piercing rhythmic phrase that gives the song a mid-tempo “drive” and thereby makes an excellent springboard for creating a highly vibrant atmosphere of tragic proportions. Melodically, it owes a few parallels to the best of Bruce Dickinson’s solo work (especially the chorus and Dickinson’s opening melody). The surprise is the bridge between chorus and verse, opened by the line “Take my eyes for what I’ve seen…”, since it’s not hard to conjure up some similarities to the Maiden classic Infinite Dreams and the part kicked off by the line “Even thought it reached new heights…”.
The Talisman is, to a degree thanks to its rushing galloping rhythm, a summary of the energy of the marching Out Of The Silent Planet from the album “Brave New World”. It’s one of the most wound-up moments on the album, with a fantastic chorus melody that doesn’t skimp on convincingly delivering the classic-and-unique code of Maiden pomp! Typical Celtic harmonizing ornaments creep into the chorus, more than effectively, evoking the energy of the new song The Alchemist. The animated middle section is interesting, where the “crying drag” across the strings of the solo expresses a few lessons learned from the genius pioneering of Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple, Rainbow, Blackmore’s Night) and underlines the feeling that the new album shows most directly yet Iron Maiden’s growth and the band’s origins in the music of the giants of seventies rock craft.
Given this finding, we can’t skip the middle instrumental passages whenever we say “The Final Frontier” is one of the most interesting “post The X Factor Maiden” albums. They’re the main guarantee of the unpredictable development of the songs, which not only bring in the required element of surprise but also dramatically deepen it. Given the happily fresh-sounding new arrangements, these parts are built in especially in songs from track no. 6 (Isle OF Avalon) to no. 10 (the last). That deepens the general feeling of an expressively stronger, more inspired and more interesting second half of this album, even though we don’t run into a point of experimentation as strong as the opening of “The Final Frontier” anywhere again. The Man Who Would Be King is also one of the most interesting and dynamic songs on the album. Simply put, the most impressive turn of events is in the middle instrumental section, where Dave Murray takes the solo role for the only time on the album. The song’s exit, in a harmonized guitar passage, evokes the energy of the album Somewhere In Time. The sound of the guitars! Even though they’re not run through guitar synthesizers, as is the hallmark of that classic Iron Maiden album. The exit draws on that album, and this feeling is most likely helped by the fact that “The Final Frontier” was recorded in exactly the same studio as “Somewhere In Time”, the most distinguished moment of the Iron Maiden catalog.
“The Final Frontier” is yet another maturity milestone. It’s the first album, since the three guitarists joined forces in the band, that makes the best use of all three of them! For the inspiration and freshness, Adrian Smith deserves the most credit. This is again “his” album. He solos on most of the solos, takes care of defining the sound effects that dominate individual songs and consequently bring to life a certain mood in the album’s high points; in short, on “The Final Frontier” Adrian is that quiet front driving wheel pulling Iron Maiden’s development along behind him! Adrian brought the same feeling right after rejoining Iron Maiden, when “Brave New World” was made. The other two guitarists, Janick Gers and Dave Murray, mostly hold down the backing for Smith’s solo spots. Gers contributes solos for the first song on the album, then on The Alchemist and The Talisman, while Murray can only be heard in the middle of The Man Who Would Be King. And even then the guitarist is set in the production at the same volume level as Smith’s motif. That last trick isn’t the only one on the album and is in fact its important peculiarity.
All three guitarists are, in fact, clearly audible in the mix throughout. They fill its spectrum in a masterfully seamless way, and that kind of sonic layout has absolutely no “holes”. What’s more, all three guitarists use different phrases throughout to carry the melody of the songs, which brings phenomenal dynamics to the arrangements and gives the listener a bone to gnaw on that they won’t get tired of for a long time. This is a very important building block in achieving the brilliant dynamics of the new album, which is further widened by the renewed integration of keyboards. They creep in here and there in the background and act as a gentle symphonic veil, a carefully considered implant for the ideal final effect of expanding the dramatic moment of the entire “The Final Frontier” theater.
If Sign Of The Cross was the Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son song for the Maiden of the nineties and beyond, a recap of the unfinished, ill-fated aborted “No Prayer For The Dying” epic Mother Russia, that energy certainly didn’t hold back in the new millennium either. It carried over to the songs Nomad, Dance Of Death and later The Legacy. So we’re talking about a new manifestation of this kind of epic! That’s When The Wild Wind Blows! The epic of the new Iron Maiden, the kind the guys have been writing since To Tame A Land (if we subtract the first hint in Hallowed Be Thy Name and Phantom Of The Opera). Upgraded with maturity for new times, as Iron Maiden have matured in the arranging sense of composing new songs. A fantastic epic loaded with piercing harmonies in thirds and the most dynamically unpredictable turn of events, held together by fantastic Dickinson choruses; the melodies turn quite a few times, and it’s certainly enriched by repeated rotations of energy swirled up by tempo changes. A song that belongs at the close of the album, and a song that presents the new Iron Maiden in new times most effectively! If earlier we poked at the works of Iron Maiden’s role models like Nektar with our hints, this song is built from the mold of a textbook of the most adventurous works of seventies rock bands. Much too rooted in the birth and essence of Iron Maiden. That’s why on “The Final Frontier” Iron Maiden often don’t give the impression of being a metal band; instead, the band’s new album is artistry of a new qualitative, expressive milestone that runs far away from genre molds!
Despite all the condensed expressiveness of the combining, the new album stays incredibly accessible. Simply because Maiden are exactly what they are. They surrendered to their primal instincts for writing and coding a musical language into the unique image of their own body of work. As long as one idea pulled in a related idea, they strung them together one after another. And nobody really expected the kind of looseness that the starkly contrasting image of the new Iron Maiden lines up. Both in atmospheric effect and in terms of the pure shaping of the compositions.
A general observation that’s easy to arrive at after repeated listening is that the closer we get to its end, the better it gets. That’s why, for the first time since the release of “Brave New World” (2000), this is an album that calls out on its own to be spun again, that you discover so gradually. When you grow into its message, you feel richer. And that’s the purpose of the freedoms of artistry in rock culture across all fields of expressive communication. We’re talking about authenticity. Iron Maiden have kept it with the new album too. And this isn’t just an album that “had to” be; it’s one that “wanted to” be. With the exceptional creative freshness on it, Iron Maiden reveal that the working chemistry of the six members was phenomenal this time in complementing each other and optimally exploited. “The Final Frontier” is an album that proves Iron Maiden keep their creative charge, reach a new milestone in the unique evolution of their musical direction in a very convincing way, and tell all the doubters they remain a band worthy of all admiration, one that even after 34 years of defiance on the scene easily inspires new musicians of the young generation. Is the new evolutionary milestone of Iron Maiden, given the album’s title, also the end of the road for Iron Maiden? I think not by a long shot!
“The Final Frontier” is an album that’s excellent! It will never overshadow the band’s golden catalog and its metal pioneering of the eighties, but with it, Iron Maiden managed for the first time in their career to catch the balance of uniting traditional Maiden elements with the novelties of creative challenges. Even on “A Matter Of Life And Death” they were still subordinating those challenges to tradition. “The Final Frontier” released that brake too, and the band capitalized on this maturity in a way that sacrificed not a shred of their own recognizable artistic essence. They fused both, with each emphasized, into a different kind of album that feels fresh, the way Maiden haven’t felt since the release of “Brave New World”. That’s the vocabulary of the biggest bands for you! A rare virtue that preserves the greatness of one’s own artistry and the awe of others!
Lineup
Bruce Dickinson – vocals
Adrian Smith – guitar
Dave Murray – guitar
Janick Gers – guitar
Steve Harris – bass guitar, keyboards
Nicko McBrain – drums
Production
Kevin Shirley
Tracklist
1. Satellite 15 The Final Frontier
2. El Dorado
3. Mother Of Mercy
4. Coming Home
5. Alchemist, The
6. Isle Of Avalon
7. Starblind
8. Talisman, The
9. Man Who Would Be King, The
10. When The Wild Wind Blows
