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This Canadian band came out of nowhere last year with their album The Train, which sports a slightly proggy traditional metal sound and a singer who is a dead ringer for Bruce Dickinson. It was released independently by the band and in March 2022, Stormspell gave it a CD release. I hadn't heard The Train when it was first going around, so this was my chance to learn what the fuss was all about.

For sure, singer Flávio Lino could easily front a Maiden Tribute band as he sounds a lot like Dickinson and inflects his voice in a similar way. That, along with Master Spy's chosen style, means comparisons to Maiden are unavoidable. "The Policeman" and "Operation Black Veil" have a Somewhere in Time flavor with riffs and vocal lines not too far removed from songs like "Alexander the Great" and "Stranger in a Strange Land." There's an odd pan pipe opening to "Cannibal Island," odd because the islands where cannibalism was a thing were mainly in the South Pacific, quite a distance from South America where Andean pan pipes come from. This song, and the next "Alien Encounter," quite frankly drag. They are akin to recent Iron Maiden where precious few good ideas are stretched over running times that are too long. I found myself either drifting or getting impatient for them to end. The title track is the longest song and wraps up the album with just a little more excitement than its immediate predecessors.

Master Spy's playing is good, and it is really hard to argue with vocals that sound like Dickinson, but The Train has too much in common with the Maiden I don't like, namely long, proggy songs that hang around longer than they should, for me to get much out of it. Your mileage may vary.