Yay! The Beast is back! Well, on the road, at least. While it's generally accepted that no live Iron Maiden album will ever come close to the seminal “Live after death” --- an opinion I can't back up, as I, to my eternal shame, have never listened to it --- it's nice to see a new Maiden live offering. It's been three years since the last one --- more a documentary set to music than an actual live offering, and concentrating mostly on the older material, mainly from “Somewhere in time”, “Powerslave” and “Number of the Beast” --- and four years for the one before that, so perhaps we're due a new live album from the boys.
En vivo! --- Iron Maiden --- 2012 (EMI)
Released as both a double CD and a DVD, “En vivo!” --- which in case your Spanish is
really bad and you can't figure it out is “live” in Spanish --- is part live concert, part documentary (what they refer to as a “video record”) of “The final frontier” tour, filmed almost exactly a year ago in Santiago, Chile. The DVD comes with the documentary and other features of course, but here we're just concentrating on the music that fills the two CDs. And a pretty representative selection it is, albeit weighted heavily with material from the last album, as you would expect.
It opens with the first track off “The final frontier”, the fairly epic “Satellite 15 … The final frontier”, although here it's split into two separate tracks. As an introduction it's not the worst, though there are better tracks to have started on I believe, but then if this is the tour for that album then I suppose they would be expected to open with the track that starts the album. For me, Bruce's voice is a little low in the mix, just here at any rate, something which hopefully will be addressed and corrected as the album moves on. I'm used to the Maiden frontman's voice commanding and controlling the performance, and indeed as the first part ends and the title track gets going you can hear him more, his voice stronger, but even at that, it's not as to the fore as I would prefer.
The crowd (50,000-strong, apparently) respond as you would expect, chanting “The final frontier” along with Bruce in ecstasy and admiration, while Janick Gers, Adrian Smith and Dave Murray do their thing on the triple guitar attack, Nicko kicking the crap out of his drumkit while Steve keeps a steady, even hand on the other half of the rhythm section. It's his humming bass that kicks in another track off “The final frontier”, the rockin' “El Dorado”, and it's clear Bruce is enjoying himself as they segue directly into the first track not off the last album, “Two minutes to midnight” from “Powerslave”, which is great to hear, even if Bruce gets the year wrong in his introduction! It's a track that really benefits from more and more guitars, and the boys definitely pile it on.
One thing about singing live I guess is that sometimes you can just let the audience get on with it and essentially sit back, and for parts of this song that's just what Dickinson does. The audience enthusiastically sings the chorus, where at times Bruce's voice seems just a little ragged. Of course,at this point they had been almost a year on the road, so it's not a huge surprise when he sounds a little worn out at times. His constant cries of “Scream for me Chile!” get a little wearing: this is only the fourth track and I've already heard him say it about six times. Small quibbles though; it is unintentionally funny though when, at the end of the song, he roars “You sing it!” and the crowd stays completely silent! Oops!
We're back to the current album then for “The talisman”, with a nice gentle guitar opening, which fools no-one, not even those who may not have heard “The final frontier”: we know a Maiden ballad is about as rare as an honest bank chairman, and indeed it soon explodes into life, though I have to say Bruce's voice does sound much better here, stronger and more authoritative as he competes with only the lone guitar and bass. It remains to be seen whether we can still hear him when the rest of the band power into life.
Well, in fairness, yes, he does keep up with them and this is more like the Bruce Dickinson I know and love: he's powerful, strong, commanding and charismatic as he yells above the music and there's no argument as to who's in control here. “The talisman” is a great rocker, something of a slowburner that suddenly pumps up the volume and tempo, and you'll shake a good head to this no question. One of the “new generation” of Maiden songs, it's a long one, almost nine minutes, and indeed one of the better tracks on “The final frontier”, plenty to get excited about. Not so much in the way of crowd participation in this, not surprisingly, as it's really just a case of headbanging and playing your air guitar, and again some in the audience may only just be getting into the “new” album, as I really only heard them singing along to the previous track, and for the opener they just chanted the name.
“Coming home” is another offering from that album, a slower cruncher than the previous, with on-the-road keyboardist Michael Kenney adding his own flourishes and embellishments to Maiden's guitar-centric music. There's great power and passion in this song, which probably attained even greater poignancy when they played Knebworth a few months later. There's only the one track from “Dance of death” (and none at all, surprisingly, from the album previous to “The final frontier”, 2006's “A matter of life and death”) and it's the title, but it seems to go down a storm with the crowd, who go into raptures when the voiceover announces
”There are more things in Heaven and Earth/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy!” and the opening guitar chords from “Dance of death” echo around the Estadio Nacional.
Bruce outdoes himself on this, a figure of menace and warning, no doubt striding purposefully across the stage under a huge Eddie (I'll be watching the DVD at a later date, but I don't think this is a bad bet). Cheers ring out around the arena as the “slow bit” comes to an end and almost Irish jig guitar melodies take the song into its heavier, faster sections. I must admit, I would have expected something like “Paschendale”, or certainly the standout “Journeyman”, if only as an encore, but they choose not to include these tracks, or at least not on the discs. Nonetheless, this is a great track and again gives the “three amigos” room and scope to shine as we know they can on their combined guitar work.
The problems, as such, with the vocals have now been well and truly ironed out, and it's full steam ahead as we power into “The trooper”, one of three tracks included from what must be seen as their most famous, successful and favourite album, “The number of the Beast”. One of the biggest cheers of the night goes up for this well-known and loved standard, and you can just feel the buzz around the stadium, fifty thousand heads shaking side to side, fifty thousand shoulders jumping up and down, arms around each other as each tries to outdo the other on air guitar and headbanging, lots of cries of “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!” rising up into the warm night air (well, it's South America: it's got to be warm, yeah?) as Maiden counterbalance the longer, more progressive tunes of recent years with a lookback to their earlier, heavy but shorter and snappier songs like this and “The wicker man”, up next.
One of only two tracks from what is seen by many, myself included, as their comeback album, 2000's “Brave new world”, it is in fact the opening track, and it's classic Maiden reborn, another big cheer as the familiar guitar chords introduce the song. A delerious crowd chant and singalong
”Your time will come!” although it's quite obvious to anyone listening to, or watching this, that Maiden's time came a long time ago, and it will be an equally long time before it goes, if ever. Pure, honest heavy metal like that which Iron Maiden purvey --- without the need for tags like nu-metal, metalcore, or even classic metal --- is timeless and always welcome wherever rock is appreciated. Bruce and the boys now play with the effortless ease of premiership footballers or winning formula 1 racing drivers: they know they can do their job and do it well; they have little if anything left to prove to anyone, and can just enjoy making their music and having a good time.
And when they're having a good time, you can bet the crowd are too!
And that's it for disc 1, as the cheers and applause ring around the arena and fade out, taking us into the second track from “Brave new world”, instantly recognised by and picked up on by the crowd, the excellent “Blood brothers”, wherein again Michael Kenney excels on the keyboards. A real “you're one of us/we're one of you” anthem, it's clearly appreciated by the crowd, and then we're into the final track from “The final frontier”, and the longest on this CD. At just over ten and a half minutes, “When the wild wind blows” is ambitious even for Maiden, for whom people used once to shake their heads and ask was “Hallowed be thy name”'s seven-plus minutes a bit long for a metal band? But it's a powerful song, with growling guitars and bass, thunderous, military-style drumming and Bruce at his dark best, and the crowd love it, you can hear that. Let's be honest: for a song that long to keep the attention and get the applause it does at the end is a testament to the fanbase Iron Maiden have, and the reverence with which the band are treated.
After that it's all standards, as the powerful steam locomotive that is “The evil that men do” throws down a marker for “Seventh son of a seventh son”, unfortunately the only example from that opus, then the title track from the largely disappointing “Fear of the dark” gets a great reception, Bruce in fine form as he struts and menaces the crowd with no doubt a big evil grin on his features. He even smilingly notes the word “chilly” in the lyric... All the expected classics come then, one after the other, with a few notable exceptions. No “Phantom of the opera”, strangely, with the debut album represented by its title track, still a great song but I would have really liked to have seen “Phantom” in there. Interesting to hear Bruce sing it though, as this is the first time I've heard a post-D'ianno version. Yes, I did see them live in Dublin. Just the once, but they didn't play that song. There's also “Running free” to close, but more of that later.
It's time to return to “The number of the Beast”, with the title track sending the crowd into paroxysms of delight and setting light (metaphorically, I hope!) to the whole stadium, the audience even shouting along with the spoken intro, then the familiar chords pounding out and shattering the not-so-still night and leading into what I would see as the climax of the whole gig, my all-time favourite, both from that album and from this band, the unutterably brilliant “Hallowed be thy name”. There is, however, something freakishly surreal about hearing 50,000 heavy metal fans bellowing part of the Lord's Prayer out into the sultry Santiago night! A seven minute-plus version of “Running free” is, for me, an anticlimax and completely unnecessary: I never liked the track originally, so a longer version to close this album is not what I would have hoped for, but there it is. It provides of course an opportunity for Bruce to interact with the audience, introduce the band, the usual thing, with mostly Harris's bass keeping the beat as Bruce tells the ecstatic crowd “Two hours of yellin' and screamin'/ We're just getting' started!” Of course, they're not, as this is the finale, the encore. But that's rock and roll, as they say.
Let's be honest, it was not even slightly likely that I was going to have anything bad to say about this album, now was it? Possibly one of the easiest reviews I've done in a while: I loved listening to the album as I wrote about it, and I could even write some in advance, knowing how good the music is. As a slice of Maiden on the road it's a winner, as a selection from their catalogue it could have been better balanced, though as it was the tour to promote “The final frontier” it was expected that that album would form the lion's share of the music. Still, a few better picks would have improved the overall tracklisting. I missed “Run to the hills”, “Can I play with madness” and bad as it was I wouldn't have minded hearing “Angel and the gambler” thrown in there.
But of course, this is the case with any live album, or indeed any live gig you go to. The older and more established the band is, the more material they have and consequently the more they have to leave off the set, otherwise they could be playing for four or five hours a night. So inevitably some better songs will get left behind, as the band try to balance the set with old classics, their own favourites and also try to push their new album as much as they can, so there's no hard feelings. But I could have definitely done without “Running free”.
Disc one, then, is top-heavy with tracks from “The final frontier”, with a few from earlier albums, while disc two is given over almost exclusively to a sort of whistle-stop tour of their better known classics from a career that spans over forty years now. So if for some reason you didn't like the last album (and why not?) then you could, largely, skip the first disc. But that would be a mistake, take my word for it. This is an album that deserves to be listened to, luxuriated in, experienced to the max. Only that way can you feel something the same as fifty thousand lucky Chileans did one hot April night last year.
In the end, all I can say, predictably, is “En vivo? Bravo! Encore!”
TRACKLISTING
Disc One
1. Satellite 15
2. The final frontier
3. El Dorado
4. Two minutes to midnight
5. The talisman
6. Coming home
7. Dance of death
8. The trooper
9. The wicker man
Disc Two
1. Blood brothers
2. When the wild wind blows
3. The evil that men do
4. Fear of the dark
5. Iron Maiden
6. The number of the Beast
7. Hallowed be thy name
8. Running free