'Iron Maiden' & 'The Number Of The Beast'

My friend, Lorena, burned me these two albums because I thought there was a better than zero chance that she would actually have these albums (there's a 98 percent chance she stole them from online).

This is because she is a metalhead. She's my age. Graduated with her. Back then, she was still a metalhead and you sort of felt that she would have grown out of it by now.

She hasn't. I don't begrudge her her tastes. It is what it is. I like bands from the 1960s.

However, there's still something extremely juvenile about heavy metal and Iron Maiden is no exception. In fact, they might be the rule.

Maiden is mascoted by Eddie, a cartoon-y skeleton that is used on their album covers, videos and in concert. Their lead singer -- Bruce Dickinson ... although he was not with the band for Iron Maiden -- is a caricuture as he shrieks and warbles on these albums.

The music is primitive. It resembles a herd of woolly mammoths stampeding through the prehistoric Mongolian plains. It rumbles and soars and within a breath it plops down in the dirt and rips open the Earth with its metal claws.

It's metal. At 30, however, do you need metal? Isn't metal for the aggressive and young? Isn't it for the disillusioned and jaded?

I'd like think our tastes improve and evolve and I often feel that metal is a dinosaur that doesn't know it should be exinct.