Almost 25 years have passed since Iron Maiden graced the heavy metal scene, and the bands impact is still felt and heard to this day. While the band readies their next studio album, they have put together here another "best-of" collection. Sure, every fan has these tunes already, but for the novice, this is a great place to start your Iron Maiden listening experience.
As far as packaging goes, you can't beat this set. With full lyrics to each song, the year and album it came from, and editorial from bassist Steve Harris, and a cool front cover illustration by Tom Adams, this is as professional and complete as you can get on a hits collection. All the signature tunes are here, such as "Run to the Hills", "The Trooper", "The Number of the Beast", "The Wicker Man", "Flight of Icarus", 'Wasted Years", plus a few more memorable tunes from throughout their career. One warning though, if you expect to hear songs from the Paul DiAnno days, better look elsewhere. This is mainly the Bruce Dickinson era, although two tracks from the Blaze Bayley years are represented, "Man on the Edge" and "Futureal." It's obvious that the band has a warm spot for Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, as no less than four songs are included from that album. If it were up to me, I'd have canned the Blaze stuff and put in more tunes from and Somewhere in Time, but that's just me. I think the band wanted to have this collection feature more material from the second leg of the group's career. All in all, sixteen tracks are on the CD, with the closer being an epic live version of "Fear of the Dark", recorded in front of 250,000 fans at Rock in Rio in 2001
. Edward the Great shows the legacy of perhaps one of the best metal bands ever, and that they are still moving forward to continue to provide their fans with classy metal music.
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