Color in Stereo

FUCK YEAH ROCK AND ROLL!!!!!!!!

This makes me so, so happy.

Iron Maiden’s new album, The Final Frontier (insanely badass cover art here), is due out in August, and to whet our collective appetite, they’ve just leaked the first track to the public. (Is it a leak if it’s calculated specifically to elicit the maximum amount of excitement? Whatever. It worked.) It’s a seven-minute whirlwind called “El Dorado,” and again, it makes me so, so happy. If you want to know why, read on – if not, just skip to the bottom for the MP3 and hear it for yourself.

The story of how and why I got into Iron Maiden, and what the band has meant to me over the years, is long and probably not interesting to anyone; in no small part, I suppose, because it’s the same story that everybody who was ever a teenager can tell about some other band. I suppose I’ll inflict it on you guys at some point. But in the meantime, what’s relevant is this: The last two Iron Maiden albums have been a little disappointing to me. I think they’re good, and it’s very clear that the band is just making the music they want to make. As a diehard fan, the latter is great, but the former just doesn’t cut it.

I’m not sure that anything they put out ever could. The relationship between a band’s diehard fans and the actual music of that band is always a little fraught. Because you love their older stuff so much, and because that older stuff is so much a part of your musical identity, you find it impossible to hear their new stuff objectively and on its own terms. This usually results in one of two things: 1) you convince yourself that the new stuff is just as good as the old stuff, even though deep down, you can’t shake the feeling that it’s not; 2) you turn on the new stuff, and suggest to anyone who will sympathize that your favorite band have totally Sold Out or Gotten Lazy or Lost The Magic.

For fans of Iron Maiden, this relationship is even a little more complicated. Maiden have always been able to inspire insane amounts of affection and devotion in their fans, more so than any other metal band I can think of. But a lot of that stems from the fact that Maiden are one of the least cool heavy metal bands out there – they’re all ugly, they dress like shit, and they have a 13-minute version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for chrissakes. (By comparison, Judas Priest – just as old and just as British – have a lead singer who drives a motorcycle on stage in the middle of every show.) So if you’re the kind of guy or gal who can get into a band despite their image, as opposed to because of it, Maiden will reward you with a bunch of amazing albums from the 80s and tour after tour of unparalleled live shows. You will feel like your affection is being reciprocated, which of course just makes you fall for them harder. And there’s an interesting psychological trick that happens when you listen to a band’s back catalog – because the stuff is already out, and because the band’s identity has already established by those records, you’re generally able to just listen to the music sans preconceived notions of what you think it should sound like. You know that everyone else has loved these records for years, which makes it easier for you to love them. You might find yourself feeling a nostalgic affection for a record you’ve literally never heard before.

But a band’s new music doesn’t get that benefit. The first time you hear it, you’re hearing it raw, and you’re put in the new and uncomfortable position of being the first person you know to have an opinion on it. Which brings us to the pesky issue of Maiden’s new music. They’ve been releasing an album every 3 years for the last decade, and while they’ve all been pretty good, it’s literally impossible for a serious Maiden fan to hear them on their own merits, outside of the context of the beloved records from the 80s.

I remember going to see Maiden in Hartford, CT, right around the release of their last album, A Matter of Life and Death. They played the first two tracks from the album, and I could sense right away that the people around me were getting antsy for some of the older stuff. After the second track ended, Bruce bantered with the crowd for a minute, and then announced that they were going to play the entire new record, back to front.

Almost immediately, a third of the people in the arena left.

A Matter of Life and Death is a good album. But it could have been flawless, and it wouldn’t have mattered – whatever it was, it was never going to be Powerslave, or Number of the Beast, or Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Iron Maiden is not a nostalgia band. It would be so easy for them to be, because everybody loves those records. They could tour on nothing but those records until they were 70 and they’d sell out every show they played. But that’s not in their DNA:

That’s a moment from that same tour, in the middle of a song called “The Greater Good of God,” which, had it been on one of those albums in the 80s, would be remembered as one of Maiden’s finest moments. It’s a really fucking cool tune. But it has the bad fortune of having been recorded after 1988, so it will always be relegated to the “oh yeah, that one” pile.

Now if you’ve made it this far, you’re wondering what all of this has to do with Iron Maiden’s new song. Long story long, I’ve wrestled with the exact same issues as every other diehard Iron Maiden fan. I have, at various times, both tried to convince myself that I really liked a new song and derided those who weren’t so sure about it as nostalgia whores, and held up new songs as proof that Iron Maiden had fallen into a rut. I’m guilty of both of those crimes.

So it’s a testament to how fun “El Dorado” is that its relationship to Maiden’s past material doesn’t even occur to me. If pressed, I would say that yes, it sounds a lot like the stuff they were putting out around Powerslave – fast, progressive, catchy, and gleefully ghoulish – but that doesn’t matter so much. What makes me so, so happy about this track is that, for the first time since getting into Maiden, I don’t want to think about whether or not I like the new stuff – I just want to listen to it over and over.

MP3: Iron Maiden – “El Dorado” (right-click to d/l)

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