Cost: $2.00
Was pleasantly surprised to find a super clean copy of an old Capitol pressing in the bargain bin. Initially I thought it was my first Maiden CD (I've found their VHS tapes in cheapo racks before) that would qualify as an actual bargain bin find, but then I remembered I had picked up Brave New World for $3 at a pawn shop a few months after it was released (while I thought the album was a good comeback, scoring it was completely overshadowed by finding CD reissues of the Agent Steel and Attacker debuts in the same trip).
To be perfectly frank, over the years as I've delved deeper and deeper into heavy metal, I've gradually come to love the Iron Maiden debut more and more to the exclusion of everything else, though there are plenty of individual later songs I definitely enjoy, with "Aces High" being at the top of the Dickinson stuff. I'm inclined to say The Number of the Beast is my favorite Bruce-era album overall--I don't know if I'd say it's necessarily better than Killers, but it's probably more consistent as a whole. The title track and especially "Hallowed Be Thy Name" are fantastic, and "Invaders" and "Gangland" seem quite underrated in the Maiden catalogue. "Run to the Hills" used to give me serious ear fatigue from overexposure to it. It's still not a favorite of mine, but listening to this CD is the first time I've heard the studio version in full for a while, and it didn't bother me that much.
Don't ask me to quantify it, but I feel this album has the last traces
of a certain specialness Maiden had which was subsequently lost. Maybe it was the last vestiges of NWOBHM in their sound, maybe it was Clive's drumming, maybe they had to prove they could still deliver without Paul--maybe it was some of all of these.
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