Shyne album 2000
Senjutsu is also one of Maiden’s most patient albums. Age and illness have cut his soaring tenor down to something more earthbound, but it feels appropriate for the gloomier material. Through the pain, he gritted out an impressive vocal performance. Senjutsu is the first Maiden album to be recorded since Dickinson was diagnosed with throat cancer, and during the sessions, he tore his Achilles tendon and learned he needed a hip replacement. The album’s darkness echoes some of the real-life circumstances of its creation.
Beginning with the martial drum pattern and thunderous riffs of the title track, Senjutsu is by turns brooding, elegiac, and bellicose. The laid-back choogle of “The Writing on the Wall” is a rare moment of lightness on what is otherwise the darkest, heaviest Maiden record since A Matter of Life and Death. Conversely, lead single “The Writing on the Wall” feels new for them, borrowing from country and blues in a way this progged-out version of Maiden never has before. “Lost in a Lost World” typifies the former mode, bookending its anthemic middle section with a pair of extended acoustic reveries. Senjutsu is thrilling both when it’s refining the Brave New World template and expanding on it. Dickinson and Smith’s return yielded a strong comeback, and each successive release has nodded to its influence while expanding into new territory. That album saw lead singer Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith rejoin the band following a mid-’90s exile that coincided with some of Maiden’s weakest records. Like every 21st century Maiden album, Senjutsu shares DNA with the refined melodies and epic scale of their 2000 reset, Brave New World. It’s another thoughtful, knotty album that has no interest in rehashing the 1980s. The band’s 17th full-length, Senjutsu, continues this trend. But this dedication showed that Maiden take their new work-more concerned with slow-building atmosphere and progressive song structures than the live-wire energy of their biggest albums-just as seriously as the classics. While plenty of their peers eventually returned to the sounds that made them famous- Metallica on Hardwired…to Self-Destruct, Black Sabbath on 13, Judas Priest on Firepower-the British metal titans have walked their own road, to the frustration of casual fans who just want to relive the high-octane gallop of “Run to the Hills” and “The Trooper.” When they toured 2006’s grim, downtempo A Matter of Life and Death and played the 70-plus minute album in its entirety, it was seen as provocation. Iron Maiden’s late-career albums have been stubbornly anti-nostalgia.