Published on Apr 5, 2002
Iron Maiden will always be fighting an uphill battle, no matter
what else they do with their musical career. They will always be
staring early hits like “The Trooper,” “The Number Of The Beast”
and “Aces High” in the face while trying to win fans’ support for
new material. They will always have the albatross of
Live After Death around their necks, and any live work they
release will ultimately be compared to what amounts to one of the
best live albums ever recorded. They will always have to deal with
the period in their career when Bruce Dickinson left the band and
Blaze Bayley tried unsuccessfully to fill the role as lead
throat.
Steve Harris and crew started to make a turn in the right
direction with
Brave New World, Iron Maiden’s “reunion” album which
welcomed Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith back into the fold.
Their latest live release,
Rock In Rio, helps to push that momentum forward, but
ultimately it too runs into the same stumbling blocks that Iron
Maiden has faced for the last decade.
The disc – recorded at the music festival of the sane name in
Rio De Janiero, Brazil in 2001, has sparked some controversy
because of alleged “overdubbing” of Dickinson’s vocals – charges
which Harris angrily denied, though he admitted he did edit some
portions where the crowd took over the singing, and re-pasted
Dickinson’s repeated vocal lines over them. In all honesty, if I
hadn’t known about this mini-controversy, I would never have been
the wiser; everything sounds pretty natural, and any edits that
Harris made seem to be air-tight.
That said, the major complaint I have with the sound on
Rock In Rio is that, on occasion, it sounds like Dickinson’s
vocal microphone was picking up distortion, and it was being turned
on and off as needed. You can almost hear a click when Dickinson
starts to sing on some of these lines – and since I heard them on
portions other than repetitive choruses, I won’t blame Harris’s
editing. But it is something that Harris should have caught in the
edit – or at least tried to explain in the liner notes as being a
limitation of recording in a festival setting.
The other complaint is that Iron Maiden relies a little too
heavily on
Brave New World – of the 18 selections performed by the band
(not including the film-music introduction), one-third of the
tracks are live versions of songs from
Brave New World. That’s 60 percent of the new disc which is
featured – and, honestly, they could have lopped that number in
half and still had a fair representation of
Brave New World. (In all fairness, though,
Live After Death featured half of
Powerslave, their current album in 1985.) Tracks like “The
Mercenary” and “Dream Of Mirrors” could have been axed in favor,
say, of material from
No Prayer For The Dying or
Somewhere In Time, two albums which are ignored in this set
list.
It is interesting to note that Dickinson doesn’t shy away from
any material from the Bayley era of Maiden, much like he took on
songs from Paul Di’Anno’s stint as lead throat. “Sign Of The Cross”
– one track from the Bayley era I actually enjoyed – proves that
Dickinson is more than just a capable vocalist, he can take nearly
any song and make it his own. “The Clansman” is not quite as
strong, though the fault is more in the source material than the
performance.
Besides the glitches in Dickinson’s vocal mix, the overall sound
of
Rock In Rio is quite good – though I admit it’s sometimes
hard to tell if Janick Gers’s contributions have been correctly
mixed, seeing there’s now three guitarists fighting for the
spotlight. There were one or two times I wish a guitar part had
been raised up in the mix, but compared to the buried guitar solos
of Gers’s on
Live At Donington, this is a major improvement.
And even the most cynical Iron Maiden fan has to admit that the
band – who sounded like they were poised for a return to glory on
Brave New World – do continue to make steps forward with
Rock In Rio. Dickinson is in fine voice, while the
three-guitar attack of Gers, Smith and Dave Murray sounds like Iron
Maiden was born to be a triple-axe attack. Harris and Nicko McBrain
are as dependable as rain on bass and drums, respectively.
It’s difficult to not compare
Rock In Rio to
Live After Death – after all, the new disc features a band
16 years older (at the time), and hopefully wiser than before their
ranks began to split a bit. While it’s not the perfect portrait of
where Iron Maiden is in the 21st Century, it offers hope of greater
things to come.