Burnt Offerings

Before ridiculous patriocheese...before The Creature From the Black Lagoon...before riffless inconsistency...before the most boring take on Spawn ever...there was Burnt Fucking Offerings. And it ruled all.

This is one of the most angry, vicious, EVIL albums I've ever heard. Sadly, what makes this album great - the sheer rage and frustration that went into writing it - is also the thing that prevents it from being played live, because it'll bring back bad memories for Jon Schaffer and then he'll lock himself in his room like the dipshit from Weezer and have to go through a year of counseling. But we can always enjoy the studio version...on a side note, it's the remastered version that I am reviewing here, and it's the remastered version that you should definitely buy - way better than the original.

The title track starts out with a chilling keyboard intro before blasting into seven minutes of malevolent thrashing, with one of those great non-triplet-based Schaffer riffs driving "Burnt Offerings" along beneath a violent vocal tradeoff between Jon and Matt Barlow, which is especially successful on the chorus. The breakneck pace of the song stops halfway through for a surprisingly pretty melodic bridge, before exploding in pure rage shortly after the five-minute mark and never looking back. The reason I'm spending so much time describing this song is because it's just THAT good.

The album continues in the same generally thrash-based vein - not quite as ripping as Night of the Stormrider but heavier and with better vocals. Highlights are multi-faceted thrasher "Diary" and its great lead guitar lines, the utterly awesome first minute or so of "Burning Oasis," and "Creator Failure," a brooding, Lovecraftian battle tank of a song...dig those shrieks at the end! The album closes with a gloomy lounge piano-ish ditty leading into Iced Earth's finest hour, the rolling, hellfire-and-brimstone epic "Dante's Inferno." Attempting to describe this song is futile...the closest comparision I can make is Mercyful Fate on steroids for sixteen minutes. Pay special attention to the kick drum-heavy grind of the sixth circle and the ominous buildup of the eighth circle leading to the stomping thrash ending. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

The major flaw of this album lies not in the sound itself, but how that sound was achieved. Schaffer has mentioned repeatedly that the band's musicianship was not quite up to par with the songwriting, and much studio trickery was needed, especially on the drums. Thankfully, the remaster does a good job of disguising the very "mechanical" drum sound evident on the original; Jon still wants to re-record the album "the right way," however. Up until now, my mind boggled at such a thought, but now I fail to see how any human being (even Tim Owens, good as he is) could do justice to Barlow's alternately enraged, mournful, barely sane, and grandiose vocal performance.

That's depressing to think about. But it's alright, because there is still Burnt Offerings, in all its turbulent, malefic, violent glory. Buy it and remember that there is a reason people started hailing Iced Earth as the new rulers of the metal heap. And it certainly wasn't Dark Saga.