Steve Harris has always been the captain that steers the Iron Maiden ship, but he’s also a guy who thrives with good collaborators, specifically Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith. When left to his own devices, Maiden’s music can quickly lose focus, and that’s exactly what happened on 1998’s Virtual XI, the second, and mercifully final album of the near-unforgivable period with Blaze Bayley as singer.

Fans have been notoriously hard on Bayley, who replaced Dickinson in 1994, and indeed he never could hold his own when performing Dickinson’s classic songs, but on his two albums with Maiden, the melodies are more in his vocal wheelhouse. The big problem is the quality, or lack thereof, of the material he was given. “The Angel And The Gambler” sees Harris channeling his inner UFO fan, but the hookless song, painfully augmented by clumsy intrusive keyboards played by Harris, carries on and on for nearly ten minutes when three or four would have sufficed. The album’s second half is especially abysmal, a bloated slog that feels twice as long as its 27 minutes. Harris is self-plagiarizing on “The Educated Fool” and “Don’t Look To The Eyes Of A Stranger,” and “When Two Worlds Collide” and “Como Estais Amigos,” while marginal improvements, are still far too tepid and give Bayley nothing to work with.

What makes Virtual XI a slight notch better than No Prayer For The Dying is that it has a pair of genuine highlights, one good, one great. “Futureal” is an energetic first track that gets the album off to a rampaging start. And don’t let naysayers tell you otherwise, “The Clansman” is a latter-day Maiden classic. The one moment where Harris’s self-indulgence yielded a moment of inspiration, the Celtic-tinged song, inspired by the films Braveheart and Rob Roy, is the kind of masterful exercise in heavy metal dynamics that was Maiden’s bread and butter during the 1980s. Bayley turns in his best vocal performance with Maiden, leading the band through the mellow intro, galloping verses, and triumphantly goofy chorus of, “Freedom!” Bolstered by a tremendous solo break by Murray and Gers, it’s a bracing track, which would be proven when Dickinson, in true Dickinsonian style, would make the song his own on the Rock In Rio live album.

1998 was an ambitious year for Maiden, as not only did Virtual XI come out in March of that year, but Harris and the band were busy overseeing the development of Ed Hunter, a first-person shooter video game in the tradition of Doom, as well as the remastering and reissuing of the entire back catalog. Virtual XI was a commercial flop, however, and Bayley’s voice failed to withstand the rigors of touring, yielding some embarrassing live renditions of Maiden classics. As grim as it was at the time, hitting rock bottom sales-wise would turn out to be the best thing to happen to the band. Bayley was fired in early 1999, and not long afterward the remaining band members would reconcile with Dickinson and Smith, they’d be reinvented as a six-piece, and would soon kick off a late-career resurgence that would see their worldwide popularity hit an all-time peak.