History shows that Iron Maiden's sixth studio album, Somewhere in Time, is one of the most argued-over efforts the band has ever released. The reasons are surely easy to spot, as band mastermind and bassist Steve Harris and crew attempted to defy the laws of rock n' roll probability for a second time.
The first law that Iron Maiden challenged was in sacking its
vocalist, Paul Di'Anno, after the band's first two albums proved to
be the catalyst of success for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal
Movement that the early years of the '80s brought us. By the time
Somewhere in Time was released, Di'Anno's replacement, Bruce
Dickinson, had guided himself into the position of Maiden's
real-life visual image, not only for his penchant for producing
high-pitched siren wails but also for his athleticism on stage. In
short, very few successful bands (especially in the world of heavy
metal) have avoided missteps in their popularity the way Iron
Maiden did with this vocalist change, let alone found themselves
actually increasing their notoriety.
So, when Iron Maiden joined in the late '80s guitar synthesizer movement by including them on Somewhere in Time, fans were split on whether their use actually enhanced the band's work, and that's where rule two needs to be factored in. For the same reasons that metal bands generally fall on their face in switching singers, adding components such as synthesizers (when they haven't been used before) have always been considered a risk. Metal fans are as fickle as they come.
Let's just say that the synthesizer use helped catapult the tracks "Wasted Years" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" into MTV's video rotation by offering a cleansed sound that exposed the band to a wider audience. Commendably, the band only tinkered with the synthesizers, choosing to also make Somewhere in Time an album that should also be remembered as a top-to-bottom songwriting effort resulting in eight songs that resemble individual epics.
And that's where I'm going to offer up some mild criticism. Somewhere in Time can be exhausting. Collectively, the songs seem to bend themselves endlessly through a maze of sounds performed in near-perfect fashion as Adrian Smith and Dave Murray share their guitar leads. Listening to Somewhere in Time is an exercise in patience as Dickinson largely avoids the cliched chorus structure prevalent in so many other songs bands were churning out at the time.
Interestingly, I always noticed this was the first Iron Maiden album that Adrian Smith stepped up with solo songwriting credits. His contributions were in not only the two songs Iron Maiden took to video but in the journey the "Sea of Madness" leads one on. This also coincided with Bruce Dickinson failing to chalk up any songwriting credits of his own for the first time since he had joined the band.
The end result, you ask? I'll argue that the Iron Maiden synthesizer experiment coupled with Adrian Smith's songwriting efforts provided a dynamic yield not only back in 1986 but today as well as the songs hold up much better than many of the hits they had previously recorded.