Download This: Thingfishy Unplugs Iron Maiden’s Entire Catalog (Almost)

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Jul 262011
 

Download This scours the web’s dark corners for cool cover freebies. View past installments.

When you think of Iron Maiden, acoustic guitar probably doesn’t come to mind. Throughout their hard-hitting run of classic heavy metal albums in the 1980s, Maiden used the instrument incredibly sparingly, often only to add flavor to a track or to give it room to get louder when the electric guitars finally kicked in. At least until some of their more experimental work in the 2000s, the term “unplugged” really had no meaning for this genre-defining sextet. Yet a die-hard Scottish Maiden fan known to the Internet as “Thingfishy” (real name: Gavin Anderson) has decided that, for almost the band’s entire catalog, the acoustic sound is where it’s at. Continue reading »

Full Albums: Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast’

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Apr 152011
 

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Covering metal songs can be tricky. The musical complexity often displayed on the originals means that to create anything new, you may have to venture away from anything resembling “metal.” In doing so, however, your music may no longer hold any appeal to fans of the band you’re covering. As a result, metal covers tend to play it safe (and, thus, be terrible).

From what we found, though, Iron Maiden fans are open-minded (or wonky) enough to appreciate a folk-rock “The Trooper” or a pan-flute “Aces High.” Maiden fans support wacky non-metal cover albums and one-offs more than you see with their peers. That made finding quality covers of every song on The Number of the Beast both more easy and more enjoyable than it was for, say, our Master of Puppets tribute two years ago. With all the terrific reinterpretations we dug up, we could just as easily have done a tribute to Piece of Mind or Iron Maiden (and maybe one day we will).

For now, though, we bring you our track-by-track, cover-by-cover look at Iron Maiden’s seminal The Number of the Beast. Eight songs, eight covers, in a wide variety of styles. Maiden songs translate beautifully to other genres, and musicians across the musical spectrum have taken advantage. Continue reading »