Maiden uniteD – Remembrance

Maiden UniteD started nine years ago as a special one-off for the Dutch Iron Maiden fan club, but then evolved into a project which has toured regularly (or as regularly as they can fit in around their other bands), and released albums – “Remembrance” is their third album.

At first glance this might seem an odd choice of album for me to be reviewing here – it is after all an album of Iron miaden covers from a band that just plays Iron miaden covers.  On closer look though you find there is more to it than that.  This is no mere tribute band – if it had been I wouldn’t have bothered with this release.  There are two things that make it special – firstly they don’t just do straight covers of the songs but instead choose to do acoustic interpretations of the songs; and secondly, the calibre of musicians involved elevates it above your typical covers band.  For a start you’ve got Threshold’s Damian Wilson and Within Temptation’s Ruud Jolie along with other musicians to form the core band, with guest appearances from members of Ayreon and Stream of passion amongst others, and two very familar names for Iron Maiden fans – Blaze Bayley and Paul Di’Anno who each do vocals on one song (Futureal and Prowler respectively).

The songs have been totally re-worked – if it wasnt for the lyrics you probably wouldn’t recognise them as Iron Maiden songs.  With the lesser known songs (i.e. the ones that weren’t hits) then I’d expected the covers to work well and they certainly do, but when it comes to covering a hit song and changing it, that is a far more risky strategy – usually many fans are incesed by a classic being changed, but if done just right the results can be excellent.  Happily the well known covers here – “Aces high” for example, while being very different to the originals, still work extremely well.  In fact I suspect it’s because they are done so differently that you tend to listen to the cover as a song on it’s own merits rather than comparing it in every small detail to the original.
The vocals are very different to the originals – with the obvious exception of the two songs with the original Iron Maiden singers doing vocals, and again the very different vocals help distance the songs from the Iron Maiden original versions.

It’s a great album, and as well as being a great album in it’s own right, it does show just how strong the Iron Maiden songs are that they can be radically re-arranged and still sound so good.

Track listing:

1. Strange world
2. Charlotte the harlot
3. Remember tomorrow
4. Burning ambition
5. Futureal
6. Aces high
7. Prowler
8. Still life ’15
9. Killers

Contributing musicians:

Damian Wilson (Threshold, Headspace) – Vocals
Ruud Jolie (Within Temptation) – Guitar, Mandolin
Joey Bruers (Up The Irons) – Bass
Stef Broks (Textures) – Drums
Huub van Loon (Dearworld) – Piano, Vocals on track 5
Thijs Schrijnemakers (Orgel Vreten) – Hammond
Mike Coolen (Within Temptation) – Drums on Prowler
Marco Kuypers (Cloudmachine) – Piano on Prowler
Thunderstick (Samson) – Drums on Burning Ambition
Wudstik (Ayreon) – Vocals on Aces High
Marcela Bovio (Stream of Passion) – Vocals on Aces High,
Violin on Still Life ’15
Paul Di’Anno (Iron Maiden) – Vocals on Prowler
Blaze Bayley (Iron Maiden) – Vocals on Futureal