The Book of Souls.

My latest piece for Insiders names my 2015 Prospect of the Year, along with a bunch of other “nominees” and the 2015 draftees with the best pro debuts.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I assumed Iron Maiden was finished as a band after 2010’s forgettable The Final Frontier, as the band members are mostly in their late 50s and have started to encounter health problems, most notably lead singer Bruce Dickinson’s bout with a cancerous tumor on his tongue earlier this year. The mere existence of their new album, The Book Of Souls, was thus a surprise, as was its length – a 90-minute double album in an era where the entire idea of an album is losing its relevance – but there was no greater shock than the fact that the album, while uneven, is pretty damn good overall.

Most of the eleven songs on the record are prog-rock in length, three clocking in beyond the ten-minute mark, but without most of the masturbatory prog-rock noodling that has forever sworn me off the likes of King Crimson or Marillion; only one track comes in under five minutes and it is by far the worst song on the album. Instead of overly complex solos or time-signature shifts, Maiden – primarily bassist and main songwriter Steve Harris – give us driving guitar riffs highly reminiscent of their peak era from The Number of the Beast through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, as well as Harris’ signature galloping bass lines. Maiden’s best material combined a strong melodic sense with the heavy major-key riffing that inspired a generation of metal bands, many of whom were overwhelmed by or assimilated into the hair-metal scourge of the late 1980s. (Queensrÿche remains, for me, the strongest of the post-Maiden acts, although they too went off the rails with Empire after Operation: Mindcrime earned far more critical acclaim than commercial success.

Because Harris didn’t write all the material on Book of Souls, there are clear stylistic differences across the various tracks, and the lead single, “Speed of Light,” written by Dickinson and Adrian Smith, is tighter and shorter than Harris’ writings. It’s worthy of comparison to the band’s best singles from the 1980s (“Wasted Years,” “The Number of the Beast,” and “Run to the Hills”), although it’s one of the songs that overtaxes Dickinson’s voice to a distressing degree. Harris keeps things to about six and a half minutes on “The Great Unknown,” providing tremendous contrast with an extended, dark acoustic outro that seems inspired by Black Sabbath and that leads perfectly into the similarly tenebrous intro to the thirteen-minute epic “The Red and the Black,” which quickly gives way to a riff very similar to the main line from “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” (I was a little disappointed that the song isn’t in any way connected to the novel of that name by Stendhal.) That song has a lengthy guitar solo that never devolves into mindless shredding, repeating an outstanding if short melodic lead guitar line, leading into a second instrumental section with two lead guitars playing parallel lines, with its only misstep in the final minute with a too-abrupt shift to the outro. “When the River Runs Deep” returns to somewhat radio-friendly length, an unabashed throwback to the period of Maiden that, in hindsight, appears to have directly influenced the rise of early thrash metal.

The album’s two great weaknesses are Dickinson’s voice, which can no longer hit the higher registers that marked him as one of the great vocalists of early metal, and the lack of ideas at the back of the last quarter or so of the release. The lyrics of “Tears of a Clown,” a tribute to Robin Williams, are embarrassingly mawkish, riddled with platitudes like “Maybe it’s all just for the best/Lay his weary head to rest.” The music sounds as if Harris had been trying to write something that might appear on the singles charts, which Maiden hasn’t pulled off since the bizarre trip to #1 in the UK of Dickinson’s “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter,” an absolute low point in the band’s history.

The 18-minute closer, “Empire of the Clouds,” marks the longest track in Maiden’s history, surpassing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from Powerslave, which quoted pieces of Coleridge’s epic poem and has become one of their most enduring hits. The comparisons are inevitable, and inevitably unfavorable, especially as it’s nearly impossible to record a rock song of nearly twenty minutes that doesn’t fall short at multiple points, and “Empire” never seems to get going in the first place; Dickinson’s operatic aspirations don’t translate at all well to the format, and the first truly memorable piece of music in the track is the two-measure guitar riff that pops up after seven-plus minutes have elapsed, by which point I assume most listeners would have abandoned ship.

That criticism may be specious in a double album that runs an hour and a half and provides plenty of music above replacement, including numerous tracks that do work as singles, including “Speed of Light,” “Death or Glory,” “When the River Runs Deep,” and lengthy opener “If Eternity Should Fail,” penned by Smith and Dickinson but more true to the spirit of Harris’ songwriting than even some of his own tracks. When “Shadows of the Valley” opens up with a lick that has to be a nod to the monumental line that starts “Wasted Years,” it’s more than enough of a statement that Harris, Smith, and Dickinson remain capable of producing songs that are worlds ahead of the artists that have long tried to emulate them.