Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
is the last great
Iron Maiden
album, reconnecting with the band's prog rock roots and reversing the signs of decline that had been evident on their previous record. By this point,
Maiden
had earned the respect of metalheads the world over with their steadfast adherence to unadulterated metal and their grandiose aesthetic. They'd made concessions neither to pop-metal nor to thrash, and their passionate fan base would never have tolerated a radical reinvention. But what do you do when your epic ambition itself has become a formula? You go even bigger and make a concept album, of course, and that's what
does here, breaking out of the creative rut they'd fallen into on
Somewhere in Time
. The concept is based on the European folklore which held that the seventh son of a seventh son would be born with special powers that could be used for good or evil (and probably also in part by fantasy author
Orson Scott Card
, who'd touched on this idea in his own work). As such, the lyrics are
at their most gothic, obsessed with supernatural mysticism of all stripes; the story line concerns the title character, born with a gift for prophecy but mistrusted by his village, which ignores his warnings of apocalyptic doom and makes him a tormented Cassandra figure. Musically, this is
at their proggiest, with abrupt, stop-on-a-dime transitions between riffs, tempos, time signatures, and song sections. Yet nearly every song has a memorable chorus, with only
"The Prophecy"
falling short in that department. They've also switched from the guitar synths of
to full-fledged keyboards, which are used here more to add atmosphere rather than taking center stage; this restores the crunch that was sometimes lacking in the shinier production of the previous album. No less than four of this album's eight songs reached the British Top Ten in some version (concert standard
"Can I Play with Madness,"
"The Evil That Men Do,"
"The Clairvoyant,"
and
"Infinite Dreams"
), while the album became the band's first U.K. chart-topper since
The Number of the Beast
. The title track is this album's extended epic (though the songs are longer in general), and it's moved out of the closing spot in yet another subtle statement about shaking things up. If
Seventh Son
doesn't epitomize their sound or define an era the way the first three
Dickinson
albums did, it nonetheless ranks among their best work.
Adrian Smith
left the band after this record, closing the book on
's classic period and heralding a dire -- and distressingly immediate -- creative decline. ~ Steve Huey