Full Album - Balls To Picasso

[Jer]

For sharing thoughts and ratings on the full album.

[Hessos]

From my individual song ratings: 3.1 stars for the album. I can live with that. The album includes a few absolute top songs, “Tears of the Dragon” being one of the most important songs in my life. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of below-par material in there as well. For most of the album, Bruce’s vocal performance is great, but there are still traces from the preceding Maiden albums where he had this mean-sounding, less melodic style. But his voice was in an unbelievable shape around this time, without a question.

The production could have been heavier, but I don’t think that would have solved much of the problems with the less good songs on the album – and the best ones work just fine. After all, Tribe of Gypsies was not a metal band, and they get to do their own thing on this one. Not so much on their later albums with Bruce. (However, I think both Eddie and Dave improved individually on the later albums; Roy not so much, because he already ruled on this one!)

All in all, this is an album that starts great and ends great, and variable stuff happens in between. For me personally, an important album, although there were better things to come from Bruce, about which I did not know about when I dug deep into this one back in the 90’s.