"Dance Of Death" was a less heralded record, and came with the built-in laugh-track that is the cover art. For a first impression, you can't do much worse than the cheap and unfinished computer graphic of a dancing baby in a mask. It is absolutely wretched art, and if I was only seeing it for the first time now, I might very well ignore the album because of what the artistic choices would lead me to imply about the people who made the record.
Back then was a different time, and I was happy to give Iron Maiden another chance. What I heard was a record deeply flawed, but still utterly engrossing. People will tell you the production is muddy and not up to par, and they would be partially right. It is a very raw record, but it also sounds pretty much exactly like the band is playing live on stage. To complain about a band sounding on record like they actually sound is rather ridiculous when you put it that way, now isn't it?
People will also complain that Iron Maiden was mired in repetitive chorus disease, and once again they would be right. Too many of these songs feature lines being repeated four or eight times, when even a change of the wording would be a relief, let alone a change in the melody. That is one of my bigger pet-peeves as a musician, and I find it interesting that Iron Maiden is the one time when I find myself excusing the practice. "No More Lies" is the most particular of these cases, where Bruce repeatedly shouting the title is a rare instance of repetition making sense. His defiance and anger only grow with each repetition, and I'm not sure adding extra lines of lyrics would improve anything. That's hard for a writer to admit.
This period of Iron Maiden was exploratory, and each album would take a slightly different turn. "Brave New World" was the return-to-form, while "A Matter Of Life And Death" would be their heaviest effort, and "The Final Frontier" their most prog. That leaves "Dance Of Death" as the blending of all of these elements, and perhaps that best explains why it remains my favorite album of theirs to this day.
The one thing I find incontrovertible is that Iron Maiden got better at writing melodies as they got older. Perhaps that is due to Bruce Dickinson's solo career, where he found his voice in two of the best back-to-back records ever made. Regardless, the choruses of these songs hit harder and hook sharper than the majority of the band's classic songs. At least for me they do.
I would say if you want to hear Iron Maiden in their purest form, it's "Dance Of Death". You get the short and sweet catchy rockers with "Wildest Dreams" and "Rainmaker", you get the epic storytelling of the title track, and then you get the band's ability to eclipse the rest of the metal world with an absolute gem in "Paschendale", which remains one of the best metal songs I've ever heard. And after that, they stretch out with long yet melodic sing-alongs like "Face In The Sand" and "The Age Of Innocence". It's classic heavy metal, but it has rarely been done so well on all fronts.
Perhaps the reason I love this record so much is that it sounds more like "Accident Of Birth" and "The Chemical Wedding" than the band ever did, before or after. Though it might be controversial to say, those Bruce Dickinson solo records are, to my ears, the best things ever associated with anyone from Iron Maiden. "Dance Of Death" comes close behind. I've been listening to this album for twenty years, and I still find myself getting caught up in the way they were able to transcend their own history to make a record with more depth and more facets than usual.
Maybe if we put a brown paper bag over the cover, more people would see in this record what I do. When "Dance Of Death" came out, I was still learning how to low metal. If it wasn't for records like this, I might never have done so. It was a great teacher then, and it remains a great friend now.
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