Egyptian Riffs

At a loss for something to write about, I slipped an album (Yep. vinyl stickler me) onto the turntable. I hadn't listened to Iron Maiden's Powerslave for some time and I was just in the mood for their operatic rock, and then I thought I'd write about this album. After all Heavy Metal isn't usually my type of music but I love several albums from Iron Maiden.

I discovered this album many years ago at a friends house - he was a full time metal head, or headbager as we used to call them. The track Rime of the Ancient Mariner was playing - the middle 8 of that song really struck me at the time. All of a sudden all the guitars die, the driving rock riff seems to have been strangled and all we are left with is the errie sound of a shift adrift on the ocean and over that comes Bruce Dickenson (least I assume it's Bruce) quoting the most famous lines from Colerdge's poem -

Day after day, night after night ,we stuck nor breath nor motion. As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink.Water, water everywhere and not any drop to drink.

It's a gloriously effective moment - spooky in its intensisty and the quiet section (as I call it) lasts for maybe four minutes before the driving rock guitars come in to finish off the song. It's a true work of art and transcends genre so that someone like me, who finds a lot of heavy metal music to be silly with all the devil worship and randy demons, can truly love this song. And I do. It's more than a rock song - it is a genuine artistic triumph - moody, atmospheric and rocking. True you can head-bang to it but you'll be doing some cultural head-banging. Ah ah, excellent!



A section of the track (including that effective middle 8 ) is embedded below, together with links to the second section - it's over ten minutes long, you know.

The rest of the album is equally good (there's not a bad track on here) and each track is almost a novel in its depth, since Maiden's style of songwriting is very much narrative driven, like a story set to music. From the rollicking rock of Aces High and 2 Minutes to Midnight, to the Egyptian saga of the title track the album doesn't put a foot wrong. In fact the track Powerslave is probably my second favourite cut on the platter. I like a few other Maiden albums but this one, to me, stands out and will always be an essential record for me.