Iron Maiden scored the best Billboard 200 performance of their career, and their best sales week since Nielsen Music began measuring in 1991, as the heavy metal group’s 16th studio album The Book of Souls debuted at Number Four with 75,000 total copies sold. Iron Maiden’s 2010 LP The Final Frontier also bowed in at Number Four, Billboard reports, but Book of Souls outsold that album’s debut week by over 12,000 copies. In an era of declining album sales, the legendary metal act have somehow mounted ascending first week sales for their past six studio albums.
Iron Maiden’s Book Of Souls was released on September 4th.
additional source: rollingstone.com
15 Responses
Typical Kevin Shirley production – just sucks the life out of the music. All midrange, drums are buried, just a horrible job of mixing. Oh well, time to play Piece of Mind.
How many times can you listen to THE TROOPER? Climb on board, BOS is worth listening to. After you listen to PIECE, check out the first OZZY album, BACK IN BLACK and BRITISH STEEL in case you haven’t heard them. I think I’ll check out ZEPPLIN 4 now,, they say the fourth song is a killer.
Alan, I love BOS but I’m going to completely agree with you on Shirley (as in ‘surely you can’t be serious’). Nicko’s drums have been dead the last few albums since he took over. We’ve come to accept what he sounded like on Piece of Mind, Powerslave, Somewhere in Time, 7th Son…etc. If ‘I am serious and don’t call me Kevin Shirley’ would just stop f’n with the drums, I’d be a happy man.
Really enjoying If Eternity Should Fail, great energy, and the lyrics are grand in scope. The surprise bit at the end is cool. Speed of Light is a good, live-sounding barnburner.
I interpret The Great Unknown as being about the present state of the middle east, and it gives food for thought. Not loving The Red and the Black. Unappealing melody; repetitive, long, and boring chord progressions supporting solos that, while well played offer nothing new from the trio of lead guitarists. The sections of the song sound stitched together digitally. The lyrics are jammed in to fit the rhythmic space instead of being shaped in an interesting way. 13 minutes of paint-by-numbers.
Good riff from Smith on Where the River Runs Deep.
The song Book of Souls is, in my opinion, an inferior retread of Powerslave.
The intro riff of Shadows of the Valley is a blatant rip-off of Wasted Years. And the riff doesn’t occur in the body of the song, so why? The song is another example of jammed-in lyrics.
Tears of a Clown is not a bad song, good chord progression, different subject matter for Maiden. Shows that the lyricist (Harris) was impacted by RW’s death as many people were.
Interesting lyrics and a nice middle section in Man of Sorrows.
Empire of the Clouds is amazing. Something very different from anything they’ve done before, and executed beautifully. I have no problem with the 18 minute length. Almost cinematic.
All of the best songs are Dickinson’s, or Dickinson co-writes. Too bad Harris, who wrote most of the early Maiden classics, isn’t digging deeper in his writing. But this album is apparently a success, and the tour will be too, so I wonder if he will ever feel the need.
I really like the album. It’s been a mainstay on my stereo for over a week now! Probably the best album they’ve made since BRAVE NEW WORLD.
Glad to see Iron Maiden get to #4 again.
I finally listened to the album for the first time the other day. There’s a lot to like. I really like the progressive direction of the 2000s version of Maiden.
Much like The Final Frontier five years ago, there’s so much going on with this album that it really requires several listens to get a feel for it.
So far, my favorite track is the opener, If Eternity Should Fail. Also, The Red and the Black and Tears of a Clown are great too. But I really need to spend more time with the album to really form an opinion.
I agree with Michael that I’d love to see a tour with Ghost on board.