Brocas: never got into 'Battle', love 'Black' to death
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Barlow and Co: Even though I can't stand anything they've recorded in the last 15 years or so, IE will always have a special lil' place in my heart.
The early 90s were a total wasteland for good, real Heavy Metal here in the USA; unless you wanted to hear Pantera, Biohazard, or Cannibal Corpse clones, you were pretty much shit out of luck. White Zombie was on Beavis and Butthead, leaving me to spend $30 for a Blind Guardian import CD that took 4-6 weeks for the cool indie shop in town to track down for me. Not a good time to be an oldschool mtalhead in this country
Iced Earth were just about the only band going for those who, like me, hated those crappy MTV 'metal' bands and wanted something more akin to the great power-speed bands of the 80s**. As such, those first 3 Iced Earth albums were an incredible lifeline for some of us here in the US. I loved the dark, angry feel they emanated. Yeah, some of the early vocalists were, uh, 'under-trained' shall we say, but they could spit out some dark, venomous stuff! 'When the Night Falls', 'Travel in Stygian', 'Angels Holocaust', 'Stormrider', 'Curse the Sky', 'Path that I Choose', just Darker Than Black stuff! LOVED IT! I drove the college radio Metal Show DJ nuts repeatedly calling in for more Iced Earth tracks, as I couldn't find the CDs locally right away**. For a couple of weeks I thought the band was called 'Ice To Earth' b/c the DJ had a slight accent
I remember interviews with the band at that time that were full of frustration and anger as they had a hard time trying to break through playing that style of metal in the US at that time; it really mirrored my own frustration with all the crap metal popular in the US. (This was about the time CM almost blew it by putting so much time and money into Cro Mags while constantly overlooking IE, who stood out on their roster like a sore thumb).
'Burnt Offerings' became THE IE album for me; it was my soundtrack for 1995. It is still in my Top 10 of the 90s. At that point they were untouchable in my eyes. I played and recorded tracks from those 1st three for everyone I tape-traded with back then. I got one of my best friends into them; next thing I knew he contacted the band and started their very first website for them (this was back in the day when it took 20 minutes to download a shitty-sounding 2-minute song clip using the fastest connection on our entire campus!
).
When 'Saga' was getting ready to be released, I told the local record store owner he should stock it; he took my advice and it was one of his best sellers for a couple of months. As a thanks he gave me all the promo stuff Century Media had sent to the store. Sadly 'Saga' did nothing for me; the band had lost its bite. If 'Offerings' sounded dark and angry (as Ion said, almost death-metally), then 'Saga' sounded sulking and brooding.... kinda like the change between Sentenced 'Amok' vs 'Down'.
I knew it was over when I heard IE re-do 'When the Night Falls' for the 'days of Purgatory' release. They took one of their darkest, most chilling songs and Barlow was singing it like a goddamned goth rock tune
I had no use for Gothed Earth; as they rode on to huge popularity with 'Alive in Athens' I quietly slipped out the back door and moved on to better bands. I've heard most of their albums since; 'Wicked' was passable but others ('Burden', 'Horror') were laughably awful to me.
So that's my IE nostalgia.
** for those from overseas or who are too young to remember, Heavy metal was hard to come by in the US in the early-mid 90s. The best indie stores only carried stuff from CM, NB, and Relapse; if you wanted anything else, you had to special order it. My local store didn't even carry many CM titles, so it took months to track down an Iced Earth cd back then. Your best record shopping was actually done at best Buy; the store that is now devoid of worthwhile music used to stock tons of CM and NB material, and they also got random imports in for good prices. I walked out of a Best Buy in Akron, OH in 1995 with cd's by Therion, Sentenced, Amorphis, Saint Vitus, Unleashed, Samael, etc. Oh how things changed once Best Buy got themselves established
Today it's easy to wonder, "gee nightsblood, why the hell weren't you listening to Dead Calm, Enchanter, Longings Past, Latent Fury, and all those other great true Metal bands that were still in the US at that time?". You have to understand that there was ZERO scene and ZERO lines of communication in most parts of the US at that time. Unless you lived in an area with active bands, you were unlikely to ever hear OF them, much less anything BY them. The ONLY thing you heard was brutal Death Metal. I spent the early 90s on a college campus with 20,000 students, located maybe an hour from Detroit, religiously listening to a weekly college radio metal show, and I never ONCE heard anyone even mention Longings Past, Enchanter, or any of those other demo bands that we all now know and love. Today you hop on line and find a Max Planck demo in a few minutes; I got online for the first time my last semester of college. The only students who owned computers were physics majors. And yes, I tape-traded a LOT back then, but I never came across any of those US trad-power metal demo bands like the stuff Arkeyn Steel has been unearthing. The stuff that we now take for granted as the best early 90s US Steel was almost impossible to find when it first came out.
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