Iron Maiden - Fear Of The Dark


There are great Iron Maiden albums, there are terrible Iron Maiden albums, and somewhere in the middle they made Fear Of The Dark right before Bruce Dickenson quit for a while. I'm not sure i feel either way about it. It doesn't suck, but it's a little too all over the place to be satisfying.

The title track is obviously a classic, and there are some fantastic instrumental sections (and the guitar tones are gorgeous in my opinion), but it's really just 12 random Iron Maiden songs about soccer hooligans, AIDS, the Gulf War, being framed for murder, dying and coming back as a ghost, you know random Iron Maiden stuff. I suppose it's all sort of loosely about fragile mental states, but not in any coherent way. It's too eclectic in my book.

Don't get me wrong, i thoroughly enjoy most every song (The Apparition gets quite tedious), but as an experience it's about 10 minutes too long and none of it flows. I feel like there's 3 EPs hiding in here, but i wouldn't even know where to start extracting them.

What do you think?

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