Burnt Offerings

There are many mysteries out there in the world. One of them would be why I keep buying Iced Earth albums considering how they have only released one good album this whole millennium (Horror Show). So here am I’m at home with one of the better Iced Earth albums Burnt Offerings. This album isn’t even my favorite Iced Earth album. This is more like my fourth favorite Iced Earth album (and they only have four albums out that I would rate higher than sixty percent).

This album is probably their slowest album now that I think about it. Pretty much every song on here opens up with some sort of acoustic intro or interlude. The verses in the songs are also slow especially when compared to most of the songs on Night of the Stormrider. It is a slower album; thankfully it has Matt Barlow on vocals to make up for that. He’s not overdramatic or anything on this album like he was on The Dark Saga, this album is hands down his strongest performance. He is a baritone singer, so his voice in generally low, although he does hit some high notes in a lot of songs, “Burning Oasis” and “Creator Failure” he sings at his highest. “Creator Failure” is the weakest song on here though, it’s too damn slow. Also in the last minute when Barlow is hitting those ridiculously high notes he sounds just annoying.

I don’t know why they decided to make this album so slow, for atmospheric reasons I guess. Yeah it does have a nice dark atmosphere, better than most thrash bands. Even though it is atmospheric it does get rather boring kind of fast. The guitars are mostly chugging, sometimes mid-paced other times slow as hell. Maybe they were going for groove or something for this slow album, but that only makes me ask why. Let’s face it, when you think about hell and damnation your thinking about groove.

If you wanted to sum up this album just listen to “Dante's Inferno”. It’s got it all, it’s slow, it has a good vocals performance, and it’s overlong. The song pretty much goes intro, slow verse, faster chorus, and another slow verse, another faster chorus only this time with chanting, slow verse and finally a demonic finale. The flaws in the song other than the fact that it’s overlong, the guitars mostly are chugging along the whole time excluding some solos. The acoustics five and a half minutes in feel unneeded, and it gets a little overdramatic before the ending of the song. With that being said it is one of the better songs on this album.

It is rather slow and sometimes feels a tad boring at times, but I can still see why this is considered to be their best album. But let’s face it, almost everything after this is pretty much boring and worthless…and I’m dumb enough to buy it all.