Iced Earth's Reviews

Something Wicked This Way Comes

The all-important return to normalcy album

Iced Earth is an interesting band in that their career has consisted of so many unique eras. Unfortunately, with the arrival of vocalist Matt Barlow, the band entered into somewhat of an identity crisis. The albums that the band had released before the arrival of Barlow, self-titled and Night Of The Stormrider, featured an awesome neo-classic power metal sound that was difficult to top. Barlow, on the other hand, begin to take the band in more of a death metal-styled direction. This really showed on Burnt Offerings and The Dark Saga. Band leader/rhythm guitarist Jon Schaffer must have realized that the band needed to rediscover their roots, because their fifth album, 1998's Something Wicked This Way Comes, features them returning to them. Was this a smart move? Read on for my review.

The return to normalcy for Iced Earth proved to be the smartest move of their career up to the time. With Something Wicked This Way Comes, the band manages to return to the melodic power rock sound that they created on 1992's Night Of The Stormrider, but at the same time manages to fuse it together with the death metal-style influence of Matt Barlow. The end result is Iced Earth's strongest album in many years. New guitarist Larry Tarnowski is no slouch in the quality department either. I had my doubts that this guy would be able to live up to the incredibly high standards of his predecessor, but he manages to do it nonetheless. Through the course of the album, the band manages to serve up a variety of excellent songs. The songs range from all-out death metal thrash rockers to slower, melodic ballads, and everything in between. The band even serves up an awesome instrumental entitled 1776, which is very similar to the classic Iron Maiden instrumental, Transylvania (ironic considering Iced Earth would cover that song not long after releasing this album.) But, as many other reviewers have stated, the best part of this album is the three-track trilogy featured at the end. Lengthy epics are something that Iced Earth albums have become famous for putting at the ends of their albums, and this is one of the finest ones of all. To put it simply, Something Wicked is, well, wicked awesome!

To date (as of June 4, 2003), this album has only been released once on CD. Some of the band's earlier work was remastered and rereleased early in the twenty-first century, but their later works were produced better than their earlier stuff, so they don't really need the remastering treatment.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is an Iced Earth masterpiece. With this album, Matt Barlow finally proved just how good of a vocalist he can be. His vocals on the last few albums often came off just seeming like mindless screaming, but here they are very good. If you're an Iced Earth fan, whether you're a die-hard one or you're just getting into the band, this is a highly recommended release. It's a sin not to have this one in your Iced Earth collection!

Buy this album on Amazon at $14.99