Slave To The Power

The Iron Maiden Tribute (MeteorCity)
by Martin Popoff

For those who want to scope the entire range of what a tribute album can be, look no further than this mammoth two-CD, 26-track dust-up to the power of death, er, ‘arry’s ‘eadbangers. You’ve got stoner rock bands fuzzing out the meticulous, power metal bands tightening up the already tight, total unknowns winning and losing (the latter, usually through the vocals), oddballs like Crowbar making “Remember Tomorrow” their own, Canada’s Tchort Fu Manchewing “Number of the Beast,” Las Cruces doing the same with “The Prisoner,” and even semi-starry pairings stirring up a little alchemy, the coolest being Fates Warning’s Ray Alder and instrumental hotshots Cosmosquad turning “Murders in the Rue Morgue” into an Aerosmith funk. A rainbow of flavors, which also extends into the song choices, Slave To The Power opening up a sociological discussion around the fact that by the year of our Jack Lord 2000, you’ve actually got bands that view Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Somewhere in Time as elden classics. In any event, this one stays highly interesting because two-thirds of it is quite irreverent and/or re-engineered, really only the European power metal bands seeing none of the pint-draining rock’n’roll fun that Maiden could get up to on one of those monster stages they practically owned throughout the ’80s.
(www.meteorcity.com)