In April 1998, Iron Maiden’s 7th album, correctly entitled 7th Son of a 7th Son, reached the No. 1 spot in the United Kingdom charts. In 2010 Prog argued the case that, irrespective of public belief and the fabric to practice, it was once obviously a prog album – and obviously their perfect prog album.
Iron Maiden’s flirtations with modern tune, writ massive over their 2010 album The Ultimate Frontier and 2021’s Senjutsu, will have to come as no marvel to longtime fans of the East Finish metalheads’ profession.
With the exception of the truth that each bassist Steve Harris and vocalist Bruce Dickinson are huge prog rock fanatics, one may just level to the band’s 1983 duvet of Jethro Tull’s Go-Eyed Mary, or the hefty modern dispositions audible on 1999’s Courageous New International album as additional evidence.
However not anything sits higher inside Maiden’s prog canon than their 1988 unlock 7th Son Of A 7th Son. An idea paintings – toying with the ones fantastic previous adversaries excellent and evil, and throwing in components of mysticism, reincarnation and the afterlife through the bucketload – 7th Son… advised the story of a legendary kid (the 7th son of a 7th son, no much less) who possessed clairvoyant powers.
It wasn’t simply the conceptual nature of the 8-track name that shoved it additional into prog territory than they’d but delved. 7th Son… was once additionally the primary Maiden album to characteristic keyboards, moderately than the guitar synths they”d used on earlier albums. Right here they had been treated through Michael Kenney, Steve Harris’ bass tech and someday reside keys participant for the band.
Musically, the album advanced sonic subject matters that Maiden had offered with 1986’s Someplace In Time album, even supposing no person may have envisaged somewhat how prog the band would take their sound.
The immense good fortune of metal-orientated lead singles Can I Play With Insanity and The Evil That Males Do (nonetheless two of the band’s best) helped offset conceivable fan unrest, however one can’t deny the overt modern flourish of opener Moonchild because it segues into Countless Goals.
Additional nonetheless, the 9 minute-plus name song – all subsidized up greater than ably through the Murray/Harris penned The Prophecy and Harris’s personal The Clairvoyant – puts 7th Son Of A 7th Son no longer even within the territory of prog steel, however nearer to dyed-in-the-wool prog rock.
None of this the band’s fanatics alternatively, with 7th Son... being the second one Maiden album (at the back of the groundbreaking The Quantity Of The Beast) to crash into the nationwide album charts in best spot. And it stays their perfect album up to now through a ways.
