Iced Earth's Reviews
Days of Purgatory (Average Rating: 8.64 out of 10)
These guys are good at what they do, but... (Rated this album with 6 out of 10)
Reviewed by
voidness
from San Mateo, CA United States
...let's be honest about what it is that they do. After encountering no small amount of hype about Iced Earth, I decided to check these guys out, and let me say that the reviewers of their albums who have said that they sound kind of like a blend of Iron Maiden and Metallica are not far off at all. One reviewer of the present album said that they got better after this album and I'm hoping that also means, "less derivative."I've been listening to heavy metal since '78, so maybe my ears have become a little jaded, but I must've heard at least two dozen things on this collection that made me say, "C'mon, that sounds like..." Two specific examples: 1) Not only does the first song, "Enter the Realm," sound like Iron Maiden retread right from the start, but it even steals a line, almost verbatim, from the Maiden song, "Killers" ("his/their eyes burn a hole in your back"), a song with which it shares more than a passing similarity in story line (Maiden's pre-death metal song had the victim being stalked by a lone psycho killer, perhaps a Jack the Ripper reference; Iced Earth's modernized/Americanized version refers to a New York gang). 2) I was actually starting to get into the song, "Desert Rain," when I heard a repeated guitar riff that made me say, "No way, that sounds just like the descending, muted-string, staccato riff from "Fade to Black" (Metallica). Now, obviously, if one listens to a lot of music one is going to find motifs that remind one of other songs, but it happened so many times when I was listening to this album that it became distracting. And sometimes Matthew Barlow's voice, especially his inflection, sounds so much like Bruce Dickinson it's almost embarassing (although I may actually like Barlow's more baritonal voice better, as I was never a big fan of much of Dickinson's quasi-operatic caterwauling). Then he'll move into a sort of Geoff Tate-like declamation, and then he'll soar off into a Rob Halford wail. Really, I'm not one of these people who's always complaining "this sounds too much like that," or who even expects a lot of originality in music, but this is just too derivative most of the time. If you are a person who truly wants to hear more Iron Maiden, or who wants to hear what it would have sounded like if Maiden had decided to go more "thrash," this might be the album for you; if not, you should probably steer clear of it. All of the above said, I actually like much of the songwriting and structures better than most of post-"# of Beast" Iron Maiden; when Maiden started using more complicated song structures and started trying to get a little too "cerebral" with their songwriting, they lost me. Iced Earth does have some really good riffing, and clever changes, but too much of the material on this collection of their re-worked early songs sounds too much like other bands' stuff.
Buy this album on Amazon at $14.99
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