Iced Earth's Reviews
The Dark Saga (Average Rating: 9.32 out of 10)
Iced Earth's BLACK ALBUM (Rated this album with 10 out of 10)
Reviewed by
Joe White
from Layton, Utah United States
One reviewer complains that other reviewers are obsessing over smilarities ICED EARTH has with other bands (most notably METALLICA and IRON MAIDEN). I don't think that reviewer gets what we are attempting to do; that is, we want to give the uninitiated an idea of what ICED EARTH sounds like and the best way to accomplish that is to compare them to other bands.Iced Earth has long combined the thrash of METALLICA with the "gallop" of IRON MAIDEN. Go listen to their excellent self-titled debut if you have a doubt about this. However, ICED EARTH has melded those two primary influences into their own unique brand of metal. With THE DARK SAGA (the band's fourth release), ICED EARTH has stripped the music down to the basic ICED EARTH sound. The songs are shorter than on previous releases and come off as pure ICED EARTH, boiled down to the essentials for your listening pleasure. What ICED EARTH has done here is what METALLICA did with the so-called "BLACK ALBUM"; ICED EARTH has rid itself of the excess and refined their sound capturing the "pure essence" of the band. The result is the essential ICED EARTH album; the band has created a metal masterpiece. Not only is the comparison to THE BLACK ALBUM appropriate from a songwriting standpoint, but it also fits because the songs on THE DARK SAGA are heavy, well-produced and big--big as in muscular riffs, powerful vocals and heavy rhythms. Oddly enough, they sound less like IRON MAIDEN with this album and more of a hybrid of BLACK ALBUM-era METALLICA and DEAD WINTER DEAD-era SAVATAGE with just a touch of OPERATION: MINDCRIME-era QUEENSRYCHE thrown in for good measure. In fact, vocalist MATT BARLOWE is sort of an amalgam of METALLICA'S JAMES HETFIELD, SAVATAGE'S ZAK STEVENS and QUEENSRYCHE'S GEOFF TATE with some resemblance to KISS'S PAUL STANLEY. The music is dark, heavy and powerful. THE DARK SAGA is as heavy as heavy metal gets without becoming black metal or death metal.
Buy this album on Amazon at $13.99
| 
