IRON MAIDEN — Nights of the Dead, Legacy of the Beast: Live in Mexico City (review)

IRON MAIDEN — Nights of the Dead, Legacy of the Beast: Live in Mexico City album cover Live album · 2020 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Pekka
There are two viewpoints for looking at the way Iron Maiden operates nowadays, of which one is to see them as an endlessly cashgrabbing nostalgia act milking the fans with a live release after another. This is of course wrong since the other, better, opinion is that if there's no live release from every tour, there's not enough! Plus they've had a continuous cycle of album tour -> hits tour -> album tour -> hits tour going on since 98, so it's not a thing they started doing in their old days.

So for me, being a semi-obsessive semi-diehard, every live release is a reason for celebration. Frankly I did not see this one coming since apart from Flight 666 they have not done any official releases from the retrospective tours despite some of them containing very strong era-specific themes that people like me would love to have. Extremely loosely based on a Maiden themed mobile game Legacy of the Beast this tour fleshes out the regular hit list with deep cuts from different points in the past, even including the Blaze era.

I saw the show in Helsinki and absolutely loved it. The stage presentation with the airborne spitfires and stained glass cathedrals was the most stunning I'd ever seen them do, and the setlist is indeed a treat. But one thing I noticed clearly was that, finally, age was starting to catch up with them. It just so happens that the person setting the tempo and keeping the beat is also the oldest member of the band, and Nicko McBrain's performance was regrettably sloppy with many a fill going sorta almost like it should but stumbling halfway.

Taken by itself the all the deficiencies of this release are not too obvious, but I happened to listen to Nights of the Dead right after the brilliant Flight 666 the other day, and compared to that one the tempos seem a bit sluggish in places, band performance less than airtight, bass sound is thin, guitars pretty quiet and Bruce, while hitting the notes, is laboring like hell. You get used to the mix after a few songs, but in comparison to the older release the difference was very obvious. One thing is the audience noise which sounds like some weird synthetic din, and as this release was a covid-19 stopgap it might even be possible that they never recorded the audience properly in the first place and had to manufacture something in its place.

The pure golden setlist takes this one very far, but the performance and production keep it from reaching its full potential. For the first time I'm a bit concerned about the future of Iron Maiden.
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