Iced Earth, Incorruptible

I never realised how much I was missing a straightforward badass heavy metal album until I listened to Iced Earth’s new release. Six years and three albums later after the departure of the iconic Matt Barlow, the band is still going strong and has managed to keep much of its original sound, without growing stale or boring.

For the most part, it’s a powerful and aggressive album, filled with intense and very infectious tracks such as Great heathen army, Black flag and Seven headed whore. I find that I really missed Schaffer’s unmistakable bass riffs and that they’re still giant Iron Maiden fanboys, which is very sweet after all these years. Most tracks are very engaging and I can’t stop tapping my foot and moving my head as I listen to them. On average, they don’t depart from their regular style, but they have enough variation to prevent monotony from setting in.

What I’ve always loved the most about Iced Earth are the darker and more ominous tracks (such as Dracula or Damien), so I’m very glad about the inclusion of tracks like The veil, which is a very intriguing grim and settled song, and most of all, Clear the way, which is a mix of pretty much everything Iced Earth is good at, sprinkled with some Irish music on top, because when have Irish instrumentals ever been bad in a song? Both are more atmospheric pieces and coincidentally (or not?), the only two tracks where Stu Block displays some sort of emotion and conviction in his voice.

And now we reach the weaker part of this record which is, as you might’ve guessed, the voice. It’s no secret that I am a massive Matt Barlow fangirl and that no one could ever fill his shoes in my eyes. This is precisely why I never expected Stu to do that, but I do expect him to be a good singer in his own right. Aaaand…. he’s not. Or at least he’s not to my liking, to put it more accurately. He’s clearly talented, he has a good voice, good range, a lot of power, but what he severely lacks is charisma. His attempts at relaying feelings translate into him being whiny and/or artificial and when he’s not being that, he sounds like he’s reading the recipe book. Most Iced Earth tracks have that storytelling quality to them and they depend a lot on a voice to bring them to life and I feel like Stu just doesn’t do justice to most of these songs. This is most obvious at the end of The relic, which is such an awesome track, with a great and carefully constructed atmosphere, that falls short because the voice accompanying this epic instrumental detracts from it, instead of turning it into an overall epic song.

The other weak spot is directly connected to the one above, which is the overabundance of Anthem-like moments, sometimes even in the middle of an otherwise badass track (like Seven headed whore, for example), where they revert to simple and almost cheesy vocalising, with little to no instruments to back it up, where a strong voice is needed to carry the song and instead we get the above-mentioned whininess, which makes the whole sequence dull and tedious. And it’s not even an emotional whininess, it’s cold and detached. It’s just whiny sonorically, if that makes sense, but again it severely lacks passion and conviction.

In the end it’s a pretty awesome album. The songwriting is solid, the instrumental is great as always, they stay loyal to their established sound, but they don’t become redundant, there are many inciting and engaging moments… not even the cheesier parts are bothering because hey, cheesiness comes with the power metal territory. The only thing that keeps it from being all the way awesome are the vocals and the “down-time” moments where they shut off the instruments to the point where it actually puts emphasis on the lacking of the voice. I’m not sure how much they can work on that, it’s already the third album and I see little improvement on this front (at least they should work around this issue, instead of attracting attention to it), but I do hope it will be better next time, because I love this band and it would be a shame for them to not revert to their normal level of quality.