Product Description

ON SEVENTH SON OF A SEVENTH SON, the songs tell the tale ofa young prophet who predicts the destruction of his village, and is ignored when he tries to warn the others. Eventually, the man goes mad and commits suicide. Employing synthesizers, Iron Maiden takes a two-fold risk: with the music and by doing a concept album. This formula might have spelled disaster for most bands, but not Iron Maiden. SEVENTH SON OF A SEVENTH SON turned out to be one of the band's strongest releases, debuting in the U.K. charts at Number One, and spawning four Top-10 singles ("Can I Play With Madness", "The EvilThat Men Do", "The Prophecy", and "Infinite Dreams"). The band's popularity had reached an all-time high around this time, as Maiden headlined the 1988 Monsters of Rock concert atEngland's Castle Donnington. During the single-day event, Iron Maiden played to a record 100,000 fans, headlining over such big names as Kiss, David Lee Roth, Guns N' Roses, and Megadeth.

Track Listing

1. Moonchild
2. Infinite Dreams
3. Can I Play With Madness
4. Evil That Men Do
5. Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son
6. Prophecy
7. Clairvoyant
8. Only The Good Die Young
9. Can I Play With Madness
10. Evil That Men Do
11. Clairvoyant
12. Infinite Dreams

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4287 in Music
• Released on: 1998-09-14
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced

Amazon.co.uk Review
By the release of this landmark eighth album, Iron Maiden had settled into what's generally considered their classic line-up. With Bruce Dickinson, Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Nicko McBrain operating at the very peak of their form, band mastermind, main songwriter and bassist Steve Harris decided to extend the Maiden remit yet further by unveiling their very first concept work. Contemporary critics scoffed in the face of such a grandiose gesture, but Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son spawned no fewer than four British hit singles and remains an indomitable highlight of the Maiden's illustrious career. From the strident commercial metal of "Can I Play With Madness", through the keyboard-enhanced epic bombast of the title track, to the fretboard intricacies and chest-beating machismo of "Only The Good Die Young", Seventh Son finds Iron Maiden at their most assured and creative. Essentially, this is a spectacular example of 22-carat heavy metal. Ian Fortnam

Customer Reviews

Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son
'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son' is the first Iron Maiden album I ever bought (quickly followed by everything before or since!) and I have to say it is one I still love after all these years. From the racing album opener 'Moonchild' to storming tracks such as 'Evil That Men Do', 'Clairvoyant' and 'Infinite Dreams' and more besides, this album produces one amazing song after another. In fact I'd go so far to say that this is one of those rare albums where every track is worthy of inclusion and adds to the overall feel of the album. This was initially snubbed by some Maiden fans for it's use of keyboards, but is often recognised as the classic it always was now hindsight can be applied. A great first port of call for new maiden fans, but be warned, like me, you will want to get their back catalogue and see what else they have to offer. A classic album from a British rock institution.

Another masterpiece slaughtered by the "loudness war"
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 specitications, 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.

Maiden's Best
I'll give the review track by track after this overview. I like this album because it was probably their most progressive of the 80's and featured a lot of great tracks.

Moonchild 8.5/10
A great opener. One of three real claims for best album opener. (The other two are 'caught somewhere in time' and 'invaders' in my opinion).

Infinite Dreams 9/10
A good track, one of Maiden's better ballads.

Can I Play With Madness 10/10
Maiden's best track.

The Evil That Men Do 9/10
A nice track. Not their best.

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son 7/10
Not their best epic. But still good.

The Prophecy 9.5/10
Maidens most underrated track. I think the alternating riffs are fantastic.

The Clairvoyant 8.5/10
Good but not amazing.

Only The Good Die Young 9/10
A good finishing track but not as good as some other finishing efforts.