Disco de Iron Maiden: “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son [Limited]”

I wouldn't give it a 5-star rating because I simply don't give 5-star ratings, unless a work is revolutionary or at least evolutionary in the rock realm.

Putting that aside, this is one of IM's finest albums. This was the THE album which baptized me as a metal lover. When I heard it for the first time at 16, I discovered that there was more to metal than just cacophonic string jamming and neck-cramps.

It's got some spectacular, gut-wrenching guitar riffs. And it's not just string-plucking, head-banging all the way. It's got a mesmerizing rhythm. Most of the tracks have that characteristic Maiden gothic hum; you can feel it in your bones. This is one of Iron Maiden's yesteryear works, before Janick Jers replaced Adrian Smith. The trio of Murray, Smith and Harris have produced some of the finest guitar-work I've heard in a life-time. And combined with Dickinson's powerful vocals, it's a masterpiece.

The album is very thematic -- all songs are actually chapters from a story, which unwinds. (Read the lyrics from each song and connect the dots.) From 'Moon Child', which tells the tale of a child with special powers, to 'Infinite Dreams', where he's haunted by his clairvoyance but doesn't know what it is. As he grows in 'Can I Play With Madness', these powers take on a stronger form and he begins to realize his mystique. In 'The Evil That Men Do', he falls in in love which ends in betrayal, followed by the title track, '7th Son Of A 7th Son'. In 'The Prophecy' and 'The Clairvoyant' he learns the purpose of his powers and what to do. In the last track, 'Only The Good Die Young', at all ends.

Definitely a collector's item for anyone who appreciates and sees a metal classic!

All Iron Maiden albums from "The Number Of The Beast" to "Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son" are absolute classics and timeless masterpieces. I grew up listening to these records, and I know every lyric, every pause, every guitar tone and every tempo change by heart. So, more than sad, I'm really angry to have to say that all the "enhanced" 1998 releases are complete sonic disasters, "loudness war" productions with the audio dynamic range slaughtered by whoever was responsible for doing the remastering. It seems that the idea was to turn all the way up the sound of every single instrument and vocal line with no regard to the equilibrium between them within the music's context. I almost cried in anger when I heard those guitar chords at the start of the song "Moonchild", with the originally carefully distorted tone turned into a mass of just plain annoying, pointless distortion, and all the feeling lost.

Every time I get to write about a dear album destroyed by a "loudness war" remaster, I ask people to go to a search engine like Google and look up the expression (between quotes for an exact match). There are over 47,000 results for it on Google alone. The "loudness war" refers to a trend which started in the late nineties in the music industry to record CD's at increasingly higher volume levels, in an attempt to lure buyers into believing that they were getting a better product because it's a "remaster" and it sounds louder. What happens most of the time is the exact opposite - masterpieces like this album are sonically cannibalized, and often (although not the case here) the audio volume is pushed beyond the limits of the CD format's specifications, which causes parts of the sound to get "clipped" (cut off, lost) because they don't "fit" within the available range. I specially recommend that people at least read an online article called "The Death Of Dynamic Range" and watch to a very popular video available on YouTube called "The Loudness War", both of which explain in an easily understandable way what this thing is all about. Things have reached such an extreme point that you can find people on P2P networks sharing lossless files with digitized versions of the original vinyl recordings of entire discographies of seminal bands like Iron Maiden because the CD's currently available are just unbearable to listen to.

As always, it's hard to tell if the band had any say in these releases, but anyway, they are an unacceptable insult to the band's musical legacy and their fans. If you want to hear Iron Maiden closer to how the original records used to sound, look for the first "non-remastered-nor-enhanced" CD releases of their albums.

I honestly don't know how anyone that appreciates good music can cut down this album. It's firmly situated in the upper-echelon of Maiden's best albums. The song writing is incredibly strong, despite some lack of cohesiveness in certain tracks. People dismissing the lyrics as corny are missing the point entirely. This is a CONCEPT ALBUM...it's trying to tell a story, but too many pabulum-fed fools can't understand this. Maiden has never been about delivering astonishingly deep music with reams of depth and relevence to world issues or anything...it's about cheap-thrill metal that sounds great. As always, Bruce's urgent vocals are incredible and are sung with his ineffable intensity. Being a Maiden album, the music is awesome and intricately layered, with their powerful signature riffs and mind-bending solos. People complaining about synthed music are simply ignoring what this album is about...the use of synthed audio adds to the drama and the power of the story. It doesn't detract from the music in ANY way, but it isn't thoughtless either. Unfortunately, certain mindless people can't accept diversity and effect if it offends the sensibilities of THEIR ideal image for Maiden. Every song on 7th Son is excellent...some parts are slow, some are fast, but all are powerful. This is the pinnacle of the band's albums.

All of the songs on this album are connected to form one main story (that's called a concept album for all of you alterna-dorks out there) about a man with supernatural powers. Supposedly it was based on a story set in colonial America but I've never actually heard of it. That's besides the point, we love Iron Maiden for all of their pomp and pretense, and this is the album that pushes those limits. Some of the songs here are among my personal maiden favorites, such as "the evil that men do" and "moonchild," but as a whole it wears you out a bit too much. Trust me, this is an awesome album, but it is...well, so awesome, that you really won't want to listen to it everyday. Also, the songs have a more than usual continuity in sound, which makes for a good concept album, but does kind of blend many excellent songs into a seemingly blur of one hour of high key Maiden Madness. For those just getting into Maiden, GET NUMBER OF THE BEAST FIRST, if you start with this one you might be intimidated...but for anyone who becomes a Maiden lover, you have to have this album.

When "Seventh Son" first came out I hated it. I felt that the band put the "concept" before the music, the guitar-synth heavy tunes were the polar opposite of songs found on "Powerslave", "Number of the Beast" and "Killers". But, occasionally I would pull the cd back out and with time I came to appreciate what Iron Maiden was doing with "Seventh Son" and several of the songs on the disk are pretty good. The title track is my favorite, it has that epic sound Maiden made famous with tunes like "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". "Only the Good Die Young", "The Evil That Men Do" and "The Prophecy", though very heavily laden with guitar-synth, are still recognizable as Iron Maiden. Judging by other reviews you either love this album, or hate it. And though I enjoy this cd now, I wouldn't recommend "Seventh Son" as the first Maiden disk to start your collection, I would pick this up only after you have become a fan of the band through their other albums first.