The Music in my Life

Yes, there’s still life in this blog.

Going back (I reviewed The Dark Saga before) to one of my favorite metal bands (and one of my favorite bands, period), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1998) was the first Iced Earth album I ever bought, back in 1998. At the time, I knew nothing about IE, but the album cover (by Greg Capullo, the main artist on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comic for years) intrigued me, and at the time I mostly had money to burn, so… why not?

Needless to say, I didn’t ever regret it — both for the band in general, and for that very album, the penultimate (excluding live albums, tributes and compilations) with singer Matt Barlow — that is, until the forthcoming Something Wicked pt. 2 (more on that later).

Like most IE albums, SWTWC is a brilliantly written, very emotional album, with an incredible rhythm guitarist and a fantastic singer (let’s admit it, they never had a bad singer except for the first one). Lyrical themes, oweing to Jon Schaffer’s fascination with history and the dark side of religion, include the Inquisition, pedophile priests ("Father in black, black as sin / Pure hypocrisy to no end"), integrity and independence of thought, a dedication to a friend of Schaffer’s who died in an accident, and a heartfelt "thank you" to the fans. But the best is yet to come…

… it’s the Something Wicked trilogy at the end of the album. A prelude to the Something Wicked pair of albums (yes, it gets a bit confusing), the three songs at the end are, quite possibly (to me, at least), the best thing Schaffer ever wrote (perhaps along with the Gettysburg trilogy a few albums later). The riffs are fast, brutal, and yet complex and perfectly played, Matt Barlow sounds better than ever, and the songwriting is pure brilliance, with middle eastern influences (more pronouned in the later re-recording in the Overture of the Wicked EP, though I prefer the original versions here). The lyrics themselves tell the beginning of a story lasting 10.000 years, which Schaffer had obviously put a lot of thought into, even at the time (years before the Framing Armageddon - Something Wicked pt. 1 album).

If you like epic, dark, emotional metal at all, buy this. Really. It’s Iced Earth at their best (while I still love the more recent albums, and I intend to review them here in the future, I think that the songwriting has lost some complexity and intensity, which this album from 10 years ago had in spades.)