THE FINAL FRONTIER

Without losing the memory of their herculean and visceral past, still present, Iron Maiden nourishes "The Final Frontier" (2010), their fifteenth album, with elaborate structures with undisguised progressive components and nuances adapted to the new millennium, visually notorious from the cover where the anthropomorphic Eddie evolved in extraterrestrial predator mode inhabits a devastated and hostile futuristic space environment.

This sensation is reflected in the heavy and gloomy synthesizer-based atmosphere of the introductory "Satellite 15...", marking an unprecedented experimental facet of the English band, after which the most direct and effective tracks flow, impregnated with the band's primordial DNA, like its continuation, the avant-garde and homonymous "The Final Frontier', the galloping "El Dorado" and "The Alchemist", the plaintive "Mother of Mercy", and the splendorous half-time of the emotive "Coming Home".

And it's from there that the songs become especially polished, with the mystical "Isle of Avalon" where Steve Harris' infallible bass and Nicko McBrain's millimetric hi-hat mark the extensive introduction to a middle section starring the lucid riffs and solos of the trio Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers, as well as the convoluted and determined "Starblind", the tempestuous odyssey "The Talisman" and its crystalline acoustic intro accompanying the settled and impostured singing of the rejuvenated Bruce Dickinson before the instrumental display in which the three guitars flirt with each other, and the vigour of the introspective "The Man Who Would Be King", loaded with melancholic textures. Along the same route, the wind-blown 'When the Wild Wind Blows' kicks off a definitive epic in which Harris' bass and the trio's guitars advance slowly but surely, following Dickinson's vocal story, and then explode into a determined instrumentation that flows splendidly and infinitely until it returns to the same winds to conclude, in my opinion, the best track on the album.

The very good "The Final Frontier" is not so much more than "Brave New World", but not so much less than "Dance of Death" or "A Matter of Life and Death", and its success in the charts (#1 in the UK and in 27 other countries...) was a reaffirmation of the validity and popularity of one of the most emblematic Heavy Metal bands.

3.5/4 stars

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