The album – or at least its title track – is inspired by the Aldous Huxley novel of the same name, and the cover is certainly appropriate. This was Maiden’s big comeback effort, when Bruce Dickinson returned to the band after two albums with Blaze Bayley on vocals ( The X Factor and Virtual XI) were largely panned by critics. A Matter Of Life Death spoke about the horrors of war quite candidly, particularly on tracks like “These Colors Don’t Run,” and “Brighter Than A Thousand Suns.” With that in mind, the image of skeletons fighting on in a hopeless battle (led by Eddie, of course) was a suitably jarring image for this release. This cover certainly fits the concept of the record. As with The X Factor, this was an attempt to have Maiden’s artwork look more realistic by putting it in 3-D, but ultimately, it looked more cartoonish than ever.
Having Eddie pose as the grim reaper is a great idea in concept, but it gets botched here because you can barely see his face, and in general, there’s just too much going on in the image for us to know what we’re supposed to focus on. Plus, it kind of looks like a still from a cut scene in a game from the original PlayStation impressive for its time, nothing special now. As for the actual cover, I prefer Cartoon Eddie over Realistic Eddie any day. The title of this one was supposed to be a play on words, because it was their 10th album (Roman numerals, get it), but little do they know that this album would share a title with a singing reality show that stood for everything heavy metal doesn’t stand for. The case against it? It’s just him against a black background, so it’s not as vibrant or eye-catching as Maiden’s most memorable covers. The case for the cover art of Maiden’s latest release is that Eddie looks more frightening (and more detailed) than he has in quite some time. In an amusing coincidence, Iron Maiden’s worst studio album also featured their worst cover art. It’s like he’s Krusty The Klown’s skeleton. More importantly, Eddie looks too silly to be genuinely frightening here. First off, the logo looks super awkward with the way they try to fit it into the color scheme. Okay, now that’s settled, let’s begin sorting this out.
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