Framing Armageddon (Something Wicked - Part 1)

Framing Armageddon is Iced Earth's 8th studio album and the second and last one with Tim Owens as singer. Framing Armageddon is also the first part of the Something Wicked saga, which he has already presented as trilogy on the Something Wicked This Way Comes album. He then decided to write the story more detailed and release whole albums around the story. Framing Armageddon covers the story beginning from the song Prophecy until the very beginning of Birth of the Wicked.

Musically Iced Earth have already shown us on the EP Overture of the Wicked, how the music is supposed to sound like. It's darker, more aggressive and supposedly more epic. Other than on The Glorious Burden, Iced Earth really went all out. They have choirs, symphonies, Tim Owens shows himself even better than on his first album which really means something. If we talk only about the complete songs, I would have given them a total of 100%.

However, this album has some serious flaws. The biggest and most obvious one is the tracklist. You see 19 songs on this album, but there aren't 19 songs there at all. In the end there are only 12 songs and 7 annoying interludes where barely anything happens. I can accept Overture for being a sad intro and its violins really fit to the topic of the first real song. However, the other ones really get annoying. Invasion only contains bad shooting sounds and even worse screaming sounds which are supposed the shooting victims. Motivation of Man could have been a real song, but was limited to only 1 minute and should be, with Invasion, the 2nd prelude to Setian Massacre. Reflections summarizes lyrically what happened on A Charge to Keep and will happen on Ten Thousand Strong, so it's completely forgettable, since there aren't any necessary thematical informations, and it's just repetitive guitars. Cataclysm, like Invasion, is just bad noise and is supposed to be a storm. Something Wicked Part 2 is the instrumental version of Birth of the Wicked with an oriental theme and The Awakening is just a woman singing incoherently. While the last 2 tracks sound interesting I still don't get the point behind them. They're way too long and very repetitive, also have no musical connection to the other songs. Execution is the only good interlude and with its flute and the angry screams of Tim Owens it builds a great contrast to the song after it, Order of the Rose.

Also, the lyrics are really dull and trivial. The story is about people who are called Setians, who are the original inhabitants of the planet Earth and are attacked and almost annihilated by humans, who, in this story, are the extraterrestrials and invade planet Earth to gain ultimate power, but the remaining survivors managed to escape and hide and seek revenge on the humans. The way they want to reach all that were adapted from a lot of conspiracy theories like shape shifting reptilians, illuminati, occult signs, satanic worshipping and that new age stuff about transcending to higher beings and gaining supernatural powers. But after A Charge to Keep the lyrics get really repetitive. They most used words are Divide, Devour and Clouding. Also it will only be bragged about how stupid mankind is and how smart the Setians are and how they deceive humans and take control over their world. This whole stuff already takes 12.000 years, but after it they still haven't managed to wipe out mankind, instead that was just procedures to keep humans busy and in the meanwhile they have prepared the ritual to summon the antichrist instead, which is by the way that thing you see on almost all the Iced Earth covers since their 1998 album. Seriously, if Jon Schaffer made a video game out of this story it would have consisted by 90% of cutscenes. If you want to know what Set Abominae - the name of their antichrist - does after that: he does the same what the Setians did in these 12,000 years.

So in the end the songs are completely stalled by the interludes and the lyrics are maybe interesting on the single songs, but they're completely insufficient to tell a whore story. If you don't care about the lyrics at all and have a way to get rid of the interludes without the need of a skip button or so, you will totally enjoy this album.