What? No Eddie shot glass? No Eddie action figure or squeezie stress-reliever? I need a stress reliever after looking over this track selection. Without a doubt one of the greatest metal bands of all time, and this dull, lifeless, colorless, Eddie-less 2-disc set includes so much mediocre to poor material, the final product hardly differs from a NAZARETH or URIAH HEEP anthology. Sorry, but it just ain't so.

Somebody was obviously told, "You must include tracks from every album." Of course, there's nothing essential at all about albums like "The X Factor", "No Prayer for the Dying" or anything else they did in the nineties for that matter. But these crappy discs get the same representation as true essentials like "Piece of Mind". Besides the delicious proggy burbles of "The Clairvoyant", you can throw the entire second disc into the wastebasket post haste. Even the first disc, primarily composed of early material gets under your skin a little, reminding you of how much "Heaven Can Wait" sounded like MR. MISTER, and above all, leaving off "Hallowed Be Thy Name" and to a lesser extent, "Prowler". Simply unforgivable.

It would make so much more sense for the kiddies to download a bunch of tracks and make their own MAIDEN 2-cd set. Packaging-wise, there's nothing here but a limp set of liner notes from former Rip editor and ex-Arista A&R guru Lonn Friend (who usually writes much better stuff than this 'just keep smiling' talking head stuff). Unless this whole thing costs about five bucks (the live version of "Running Free" alone is worth that much), there's just no point.

If you're interested in getting a genuine, overflowing steel tankard of a MAIDEN sampler, pick up "Live After Death". If you can score the colorful two-cd reissue version from a couple of years back, (or ideally the original 2-LP set with the tour program in it) that would be an ideal sampling of these metal gods at their absolute tightest, and the track listing is unbeatable. That may be just enough to convince you to do the proper thing, and collect every title from the debut up through "Powerslave". But whatever you do, stay away from this turd.

- Marchman

OFFICIAL SITE: www.ironmaiden.com

RELATED ITEMS: No related articles at this time.