Iced Earth

This could've been such a balls-out album, except three things hinder it terribly.

1) very bad production
2) the lead singer
3) brain-dead songwriting lapses

First, the production. When your demo sounds better than this, then you've got a problem! The guitar tone is flat and weak, and the reverb is misused, giving a muffled effect. Seriously, Enter the Realm repeatedly kicks this thing in whatever shriveled nuts it may have...

Speaking of shriveled nuts, we've got Gene Adam, who sounds like Quorthon attempting to do Rob Halford - a pseudo-evil screech... yeah, that's it. The Saved by the Bell dork. I can totally see Gene Adam taping his glasses back together after his lunch money was stolen. There's a good reason he was replaced... he is really mediocre.

Now, the MAIN major flaw. I can look past necroness and other distractions, but when the songwriting suffers, then the album suffers. What is making it suffer? Stupid slow moments that just make no sense. We all know Schaffer has that shit in him - he craps out ballads by the buttful, obviously, because they clog up the later Iced Earth albums. Here, they appear as dorktacular little interludes. See "Iced Earth". See the triplets. Hear the triplets. Obey the triplets. Bang, bang, bang, and then there's that idiotic "earth and fire, water and air" section, with Gene Adam being the most prominent thing in the mix - and then the guitars do this "Maiden on Valium" thing for a while, and oh it just doesn't make sense.

Written on the Walls... same thing. Man, somewhere in here is 22 minutes of riffological goodness. Colors has the most of it - again, it's nowhere near as good as the demo version, but it's still competent, and the idiot parade section is kept mercifully short. Curse the Stupid Intro, Snooze and Death, Solinterlude, Dork Funeral, etc. They all rage with the power of a thousand bulldozers, and then they all come to a screeching halt as a line of ducklings is permitted to gently cross the street.

ARGH!!! I WANNA MOTHERFUCKING RIP KITTENS IN HALF AND YOU'RE NOT LETTING ME.

Schizophrenia. Paranoia. Bring me Cool Edit, I must do some surgery.