ICED EARTH — Iced Earth (review)

Album · 1990 · US Power Metal

4.5/5 · 2011-01-29
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This self-titled release is the first full-length album by American metal band Iced Earth, released in 1991. Several of the tracks on the album appeared on the band’s demo Enter the Realm, and features almost the same line-up of musicians except the drummer. The album was re-mastered and re-mixed in 2001 and it is for this re-master that this review is written.

Material wise, the album is of an exceptionally high quality throughout its eight tracks and in my opinion includes several of the band’s best songs, these being the tracks Iced Earth, Colors, and When the Night Falls. The sound here takes influences mainly from US style Power Metal and Thrash Metal, with some parts, particularly Colors, sounding more at home with a traditional Heavy Metal tag. The writing and musicianship stays really strong all the time and in most cases, there isn’t much more you could ask for out of an album.

There’s just one really big problem: the vocals of the band’s then singer Gene Adam. His vocals were the reason that it took me a long time to properly appreciate Iced Earth as an album. To make matters worse, the initial impressions garnered from the title track, which is the first on the disc, are actually the worst of the vocal performances on the album, and when I first checked out Iced Earth, it was many years after it was released and therefore the band had already put out the compilation album Days of Purgatory which features most of the songs on this album with new vocals recorded by Matt Barlow, and for a long time I was of the opinion that the album Iced Earth was a shaky start for this great band, and I would be sticking to what I feel are versions with highly superior vocals. Well actually I guess I am still of that opinion, but one day I came to the conclusion that Iced Earth is one of my favourite bands of all time, and that I owed it to myself to properly checked out the material with Gene Adam. To my pleasant surprise his vocals actually sound hell of a lot better on most of the tracks than they do on the song Iced Earth, sometimes they even fit very well the music. In short I made one huge mistake writing this album off after hearing the song Iced Earth with Adam’s vocals. Maybe this album is one that needs time for the vocals to be gotten used to, or maybe I was always letting myself in for a fall by being used to the Barlow voiced versions, but despite taking ages to get into this album, I have come to realise what a great album it is.

With this said, the song Iced Earth is still one of the best on the album, however the version presented here is by far inferior to the one on Days of Purgatory. Of course, that version wouldn’t exist for several years after this originally came out, so it would be unfair to always compare them and tell you to go listen to the Barlow voiced version instead. What I will say here is however that despite being butchered by the vocals, the strength of the song can be heard very well. I suppose there's another issue that should be mentioned with regards to the album, but especially this song. The vocals sound much better on the band's Enter the Realm demo than they do on this album. The song Iced Earth sounds great on the demo even with Gene's vocals yet here it's been butchered. In my opinion that should not happen.

There are a couple of instrumentals on the album, Solitude and The Funeral. The first is fairly short piece while the second is a lengthier affair. Although it may be mean to say it, but the inclusion of these tracks provides a nice breather from Gene Adam’s vocals. Strangely the two tracks are placed together in the album’s track list. Personally I think they should have been separated since it kind of seems odd to me to put the two instrumental tracks together rather than using them to break up the vocal songs more, although since Solitude is so short, perhaps I’m just being picky now.

So in summary the vocals are definitely the weak link here, if they were better this album would probably be worth a score on the real high end of the 1 – 10 scale, but as it is, the vocals are very far from perfect and therefore I cannot justify a score higher than that of a solid album. This is probably my least favourite Iced Earth release because of the vocals, one I see being played the least out of my collection of their albums, however the musicianship and especially the writing of band leader Jon Schaffer needs to be acknowledged, as of that of lead guitarist Randall Shawver, who is credited with writing on most tracks as well.

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven)