Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Dance of Death, as album titles go, it’s a fair one to place on an album cover especially by arguably the U.K.’s leading Heavy Metal band enjoying a new renaissance with Adrian Smith and lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson back within the helm. It conjurors up thoughts of a last waltz, which thankfully will be suspended for as long as possible, of a macabre game with the Grim Reaper, or in this case the band’s long time mascot Eddie doing a plausible impression of the figure in black as if taken from a gruesome version of the film The Seventh Seal, as Death itself holds out its hand and asks you to join together.

Of course being Iron Maiden, especially with Bruce and Adrian being back in the group, there is no way you can turn down Death’s appeal and whilst not quite a return to the form that the band had before the days of Fear Of The Dark, it was certainly a welcome album when compared to the couple of albums that nearly decimated the abiding and much loved memory during the mid to late 1990s.

Thirteen maybe unlucky for some but in Iron Maiden’s case, it signalled the kind of music that the listener could really get their teeth stuck into, to feel the flavour of Steve Harris’ bass, the power and intensity that Nicko McBrain had always managed to supply with the drums but now with a lenient edge that was delightful to hear and with the ever glowing Janick Gers and Dave Murray making sure that this second chance would not go to waste.

Whereas the first album as a six piece in 2000, the favourable Brave New World, was a melting pot of ideas bought together with a single focus, Dance of Death stirs the passions that was felt towards the end of the 1980s and even in to the commercially successful No Prayer For The Dying, it has an urge, a compelling force making it sound as if the group were once more entitled to retake the crown they had vacated between 1993 and 1999, namely the best Heavy Metal band in the U.K. if not Europe.

The one thing that has been part of the Iron Maiden arsenal, the real heavy gun that obliterates almost every other Heave Metal group from the British Isles is their unnerving ability to tell a story, to capture the process of getting a short story into the realms of a song and making it stand out as interesting and dynamic. The tracks on Dance of Death have more than enough of the story writer about them, whether through Adrian Smith in the fantastic Paschendale or long time lyric writer Steve Harris with perhaps arguably the strongest, the most vocally stunning and gut busting track No More Lies, the songs pre 1993 and post 2000 have all the hall marks of being short stories of infinite refinement, of being as good an idea as anything that can be placed into a film script and for that the band should be praised.

With the 100th anniversary of World War One not that far off, Paschendale is perhaps the one track on the album that will strike a chord with listeners. For anyone of a certain age who listened to Iron Maiden during their first great era, the memories of relations who lived, who served during a war that was the biggest and undisputed waste of human life in the history of war would play on their minds. The Battle of Passchendaele is too large, the slaughter of men to enormous too even contemplate in the minds of many today without reading about the insanity for many years at University, what Iron Maiden managed to was to take the extremeness, the burning, the bullets and death and present it in such a way that the mayhem and absolute destruction are felt through every word in the lyric and through every musical note made.

Of all the things that stand out in the lyrics for the song it is within the verse that starts with “Crucified as if on the cross…”, the image of crucifixion is a strange one to have but it is telling. The slaughter of innocents and innocence, people on both sides dying for a cause that in no way did they have a say in, to use the term crucified will make the listener instantly think of Jesus and the Crucifixion, how one man died for all and whilst the religious overtones don’t sit easily within the world of Heavy Metal and certainly not war, it is always a surprise when programmes are produced and television series are commissioned about any particular war, an almost universal throw-away line will be along the lines of, “God is on our side because we are right.” The use of anybody’s personal deity or belief in the context of war seems as alien as fighting for a scrap of land.

Crucified also brings the image of metal tearing through a person’s body and coming through the other side, the shrapnel or bullet represented as a nail bursting through dense skin and bone as the person holds hands up their arms, either in surrender or as they have been struck as if by some stigmata like affliction.  The notion of crucify can also been seen as one of criticism and the generals in charge on both sides of the dividing line certainly came in for that, none more so that the phrase, “Lions led by donkeys” in which the British infantryman  wase led to their deaths by the incompetence of those in charge.

The final two lines of the verse see the narrator implore that the truth be known of Paschendale. In a war that was fought almost as a prelude to World War Two, a war in which the winner was judged not by the moral high ground as was the case between 1939 and 45 but because mechanisation and industry had made the slaughter of millions possible, there can surely be truth, for anyone who was a witness, for anyone who took another life, the act of state sponsored killing had reached a new dangerous and frightening level; they had joined the dance of death.

Dance of Death was a very welcome return to form for Iron Maiden and one in which heralded the silver age of the band’s material which has seen them since release the very cool A Matter of Life and Death and the outstanding The Final Frontier, Dance of Death is an Iron Maiden album of the very best quality.

Ian D. Hall