Gareth Smith – Google

I am a hardcore maiden fan of over 40 years and I must say that this NOT a good album. The production is poor. On some tracks Bruce's vocals are half buried in the mix. Steve insists on playing keyboards on almost every track and it sounds terrible. For a start it is too prominent in the mix and sounds like the orchestra effect from a 1980s yamaha polyphonic keyboard. If you want an orchestral sound, hire an orchestra, or at least use a keyboard made after 1985 that can accurately recreate the sound of a string section. Then there's Steve's keyboard playing. Rick Wakeman he is not. Dragging out a chord for four bars does not sound good. It literally adds nothing to the songs but a shrill whine that ruins the listening experience and is overbearing in the mix. Now we come to the songs. Whilst there are a couple of decent tracks, the rest were essentially retreading old ground. You know what to expect with maiden but I think they are running out of ideas and are now following the Mike Love philosophy of 'don't mess with the formula'. Many of the lyrics amount to little more than clichés and old sayings. The production is awful. I do not rate Kevin Shirley as a producer. Steve Harris is listed as a co producer but I suspect it's a case of what he says goes and Kevin is just there as a yes man. They need to bring someone else in to produce the next album. Someone with a bit of backbone who isn't frightened to offer some input. Not really surprising that the most recent tours have essentially been greatest hits tours, because the bands output since 'brave new world', which is a fantastic album, hasn't really set the world on fire.

I can't believe David Chase wrote this. Dialogue was poor, the pacing slow. Alessandro Nivola is a fine actor but just wasn't believable as a mobster. Same applies to the usually excellent Leslie Odom Jr. Corey Stoll was woefully miscast as junior and I didn't like the way junior was written as a spineless weakling rather than a respected captain. The actors playing Livia, Paulie and Silvio were basically doing bad impressions of the characters from the TV series. Especially Silvio. No disrespect to John Magaro but his incarnation of Sil was just so camp and over exaggerated. The movement and mannerisms were a cross between Liberace and Nosferatu and the voice was like an old lady who smoked too many cigarettes. Jon Bernthal was wasted. Hardly any lines and the few lines he did have either started or ended with "oohhhh". Ray Liotta on the other hand put in a fine performance in dual roles as 'Hollywood' Dick Moltisanti, an arrogant veteran wise guy, and his twin brother Sal, a somewhat introspective lifer. Michael Gandolfini was good. He wasn't trying to emulate his father. He did a good job playing a young man getting to grips with the world and slowly realising the lifestyle he was born into. If Chase really is thinking about a follow up prequel TV series or movie then I suggest that he brings in new writers and tells the cast to tone things down a bit. This was a bad sopranos cosplay.