Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

There is nothing wrong with showboating, even revelling in excellence, of being so technically adept that your brilliance shines through and keeps you at the top of your game with no one seriously challenging your crown, and yet expertise, specialised connoisseurship, is wasted if you don’t allow the soul to be seen, to be felt, to be heard beating in time with the heart.

After six years away from the studio, Iron Maiden return to the nation’s collective earholes and add yet another technically superior album to the metal catalogue, and yet as the songs play out, as the sense of metal progression weaves their narratives, their tropes and Steve Harris’s absolute authority as one of the keenest observers of historical turned music persuaders of our time, there is a sense, disturbing maybe to the older fan who have been with them every step of the way, possibly ignored by the younger generation who refuse to seek solace in anything lengthier than a couple of minutes, but a sense nonetheless that the album has no soul.

Senjutsu is a work of art, in the same realm arguably as The Scream, as the Venus de Milo, as The Starry Night by Van Gogh, the difference being is that in all those pieces of intrinsic human expression, you can feel the heartbeat within, you are placed within the work and asked, implored by the artist to feel what the subject feels, to be overcome by the pain of the soul, by the beauty of its delivery; unfortunately, and with huge regret, Senjutsu does not offer the listener the same dramatic escape.

Arguably for the first time since vocalist Bruce Dickinson re-joined the band  after Blaze Bayley’s brief two album tenure appearance  at the vocal helm, the sense of Time being a cage is in evidence; the lock may not have the key turned, the band members may be able to come and go as they please, but the steel bars are a reminder that in the end all that has gone before, all the heart that was on show, can soon feel weighed down, can soon start to rust.

There will always be good will, absolute love for the band that reached the pinnacle of the metal true, not once, but twice, however as tracks that are colossus in scale are brought to the listener’s attention, the feeling remains that the soul, precious, the titan behind albums such as Number of The Beast, Fear Of The Dark, and even The Book of Souls, has, if not lost, at least hidden from view; and songs such as Stratego, The Time Machine, Death of The Celts and The Parchment, suffer for its shrouded absence.

Six long years in which they have toured the world twice, but it must be asked whether the finest of all British Metal bands have forgotten what it meant to be in tune with the genre.

Ian D. Hall