By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

IRON MAIDEN – POWERSLAVE (1984)

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. I had to delay this article by a week because of real life issues and I just couldn’t come up with a decent piece for the album I WAS planning on writing about originally. Frustrated that my writing was crap, I ended up choosing to write about Iron Maiden’s Powerslave album based on a couple of reasons. The first was I chose the album as driving music for one of the days I was out running errands. That was the CD edition I own of course, but since I also have the cassette version as well, I dug that out when reason #2 presented itself.

I was reading up on one of the music groups I belong to on Facebook and one of the other members commented on a post about the album saying how it was the last Iron Maiden album they had liked. I read that post and thought to myself, “forty years and they hadn’t liked anything else Iron Maiden had done?” I can understand not liking a particular song or even a particular album over four decades but the entire catalog over that time? So I wanted to check in again with the album to see if giving it a good listen could make me understand why that poster  was done with the band afterwards.

Oddly enough, despite featuring at least four all-time classic tracks in their catalog, for me Powerslave is not one of the band’s albums that I do full listens to all that often.

The first side of the album opens up with two of those classic tracks, “Aces High” and “2 Minutes to Midnight”. The two songs were also the ones chosen to be released as singles from the album. For “Aces High” which is about the “Battle of Britain”, which is credited as the first major military battle fought entirely with air forces. And the relentless pacing of the song certainly captures the feeling that must’ve been going on during all the battle. Pure adrenaline fueling the music and your heart rate! Of course, what helps make the song so memorable is the intro used for the video and in all their concert performances. Iron Maiden features a speech from Winston Churchill (“we shall fight on the beaches…”)and it is a perfect setup to launch into the song.

As for “2 Minutes To Midnight”, which is about the Doomsday Clock and how the Cold War tensions kept inching the clock forward. I love how in reading about the song I learned that guitarist Adrian Smith and singer Bruce Dickinson wrote the song, according to Smith, in about 20 minutes. Imagine being able to write a stone cold classic song in less time that it takes to watch an episode of a sitcom. The song kicks off pretty fast, burning its way through pretty much in the same fashion as “Aces High”. You get that killer musical pacing and the drop dead awesome vocal intonation from Dickinson. I remember the first time I heard the song and was blown away when the lyrical line “The body bags and little rags / of children torn in two” came through. First, the image it conjures is terrible but the way the point was driven home was how it was performed by Dickinson. There’s an extra bit of edge to his line delivery there and for some reason it always remains such a descriptively memorable part of the song for me.

Can I tell you the truth? The instrumental “Losfer Words (Big ‘Orra)” is not a song I really enjoy all that much. Sure it’s got a highly jaunty rocking pace to it but while the band may not have been able to come up with lyrics for the song (as originally intended when they wrote the piece), I really wanted to hear some vocals here and kind of zone out a bit when I hear this track.

While “Flash of the Blade” is probably considered a “lesser” track in Iron Maiden’s catalog of songs, I really love how they worked up a song that talked about Bruce Dickinson’s love of fencing. I found myself really digging into the lyrics for the song as I listened to it for this article and found that as I listened, I got inspired enough that I wondered what it would feel like to be learning how to fence and the rush you’d get from all that thrust, cut and parrying action.

The first side of the album closes out on the song “The Duellists” which as you listen to the performance, you could find yourself thinking it was thematically similar to “Flash of the Blade”, the song was written by Steve Harris and is based off the Ridley Scott movie of the same name. There is dueling involved, but mostly it is about two rival French officers during the Napoleonic Wars. Once again, this isn’t a song I have listened to nearly as much over the years but I do like the way this song comes out in the end. And with a lengthy mid-song instrumental piece, I found it more interesting because of the lyrics before and after that instrumental break.

For Side Two, the album is shorter in terms of having just three songs (Side One had five tracks) but thanks to some lengthy running times for the songs, it is actually a bit longer in the overall running time.

Iron Maiden wastes little time in ramping up their musical rampaging with “Back in the Village” which is a sequel track to their song “The Prisoner” (released in 1982). Of course, both tracks are based on the classic British TV show “The Prisoner”, which is a show I must get around to watching someday for all the good things I’ve heard about it. As for the song itself, it is another fast paced rocker song and I found myself appreciating it a bit more than I think I might’ve done before. I don’t know why, since I’ve always kind of like the song but it just hit differently for me this time.

The “Powerslave” title track song is obviously the key song for the album but not just because it serves as said album track. The ancient Egyptian themes and the artwork inspiration for the album also served as the motif the band used for their world tour promoting the Powerslave album. It’s a freaking incredible song that I can’t get enough of whenever I hear it.

Now, the closing song on the original version of the album brings up something for me that I always found interesting. When I was in school, I kind of hated history class. Not that I couldn’t do the work or anything, but it was just so flat, dull and boring to me a lot of the time. And let’s not forget that I went to school at a time when learning from ANY alternate sources was actively frowned upon by teachers. I once had a teacher get mad because when asked how I did so well on a test about Greek mythology, I told her that it was due to reading Thor comic books. She correctly pointed out the fact that it was Norse mythology being used in the comic books. But when I told her the comics got me interested in actual Norse mythology and reading about that got me interested in Greek mythology, she was kind of snippy about it. As if the reason I got the good grade somehow cheapened the grade itself.

Well, if she’d ever tested me on stuff that I learned about through Iron Maiden’s many songs drawing from literature, history and the like, her head might’ve exploded!

But my interest in history wasn’t originally peaked by the Powerslave album. The reason for that is I didn’t “discover” Iron Maiden until their next album, Somewhere in Time. It was the “Alexander The Great” track on that album that piqued my interest. But as my interest in the band grew and I started getting their back albums and learned of how they drew their inspiration from all these rich actual sources of literature and history, I found myself wanting to know more after listening to the songs.

I imagine that Iron Maiden being consistently able to bring history alive in such a way that interested me is why I became such a fan of this album’s closing track “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Based on the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem which has the same title, the song takes you on the same long journey the poem conjures up. It is over thirteen minutes long making it the longest Iron Maiden song for over thirty years. But what makes the song so interesting isn’t just how it was inspired by the poem but the way the band turns the song into such an event. You get their overarching rocking musical soundtrack but there’s spoken word material and sound effects to build that illusion of both being at sea and I think the sense of madness closing in at one point as well.

I’ve seen the band perform this track live and it is a showstopping piece of perfection to say the least. Plus, three of the band members have gone on record saying it was their favorite song to perform live as well. 

I still may not understand why someone would’ve stopped listening to Iron Maiden after this album but as I listened to Powerslave for the writing of this article, I can certainly concur with the notion that the album is such a classic that it sounds as fresh and vibrant only a couple weeks short of its 41st anniversary as it did when it was first released. It is simply a classic metal album of the first order.

NOTES OF INTEREST: The Powerslave album peaked at #21 on the Billboard album chart. It has officially been certified platinum according the the album’s Wikipedia page, though I don’t know if it has gotten more certifications in the forty plus years since its original release.

The album got reissued in 1995 with a 4-track bonus disc included. It was also reissued in both 1998 and 2015.

The tour for the album was called the “World Slavery Tour” and went for eleven months. It led to one of the greatest live albums ever in Live After Death. While I’ve seen the band a number of times since I “discovered” them, I missed out on this particular tour, though I do have a replica T-shirt for the tour.