The Glorious Burden

Remember those cheap hunks of plastic that the cashiers handed to you with every McDonalds Happy Meal that somehow passed off as toys? That's what this album is like. A cheap, boring novelty item that serves as entertainment for a few moments, before the initial shock wears off, and the owner chucks it into the garbage bin, or perhaps forgets it underneath the table or inside those putrid cesspools that the company called play-pens. It was a funny joke while it lasted, but of course you'd rather have the deluxe Transformers model that came out last month, since it'll last so much longer, which is akin to how there are many other albums that will entertain you for far longer than this piece of bland drollery could ever dream to.

I have had this album for over a year now, and I've deleted and re-added it to my iTunes playlist about three times since I first received it, desperately hoping it might get better or suddenly grow on me, as other albums have. But no, The Glorious Burden just gets more and more infuriating and dull every single time, confirming my suspicions that Iced Earth is one of the most bloated, massively overrated metal bands on this entire green Earth. This was their first album with newly recruited shrieker Tim Owens, who is actually an excellent vocalist, but he can do little with the tepid, droning material found on Iced Earth's The Glorious Burden. That's this album's worst flaw - it's just boring as fuck. I guess a large proportion of this dullness is due to the production. Iced Earth went all-out and got a production job that is technically good and clear, but it sounds like a slab of cardboard more than a slab of metal. The guitar tone is nice and safe, perfectly sterile and vanilla, no crunch or edge or it all. Everything here is technically good, but nothing here is exciting, stimulating, or fun in the least.

That wouldn't be terrible if the songs here were ass-stomping metallic slabs of ownage, but they're really not. The songs on this album are all exercises in staying awake, and at best, they'll fade into slushy, boring background music while you forget you're even listening to anything. I've had this problem with other albums, but never to the magnitude I experienced with this album. It's actually a pretty monumental accomplishment if you think about it - I mean hell, some bands create good music without trying, and some bands end up making appallingly bad albums...but never have I seen a band apparently put THIS MUCH WORK into such an unbelievably boring album. It's like they were intentionally trying to create a faceless, bland piece of plastic background music, and putting strenuous labor into making it as sleep-inducing as possible, because this album really is a complete black hole, devoid of any semblances of originality, creativity, passion or energy. Not one spark of emotion or feeling is evoked throughout the 70+ minutes of this album. Not even one. This is not helped at all by the fact that the band has completely run out of ideas musically, and mostly every song here features the same galloping riff triplets over and over again, indistinguishable aside from the tired, weak gang choruses that the band had been doing on the last few albums before this. Astonishingly yawn-inducing, but what did you really expect at this point? They ran out of ideas about 10 years before this album was released.

The lyrics here are a real sticky point. Not because they're poorly written, because these are pretty standard for Iced Earth overall. And while it might be a detractor for some people, the fact that the lyrics are overtly and shamelessly patriotic isn't the reason I dislike them either. Iced Earth's lyrics for this album are really, really artificial and fake sounding. They may be patriotic, but they're patriotic in the same way a middle schooler is when he's grudgingly writing a 500 word essay for his 8th grade U.S. History class. Being that he doesn't want to do it, his paper comes off rather forced and contrived, not really feeling 'patriotic' at all. Iced Earth are a tad bit different, as they (or at least Schaffer does) do care about their heroic, patriotic ideals, and they do care about their country a whole hell of a lot, but the lyrics here still sound as fake as Pamela Anderson's breasts. There's no feeling to it, at all. As if the band just wrote these patriotic lyrics for the sake of being patriotic. Just like the middle schooler. The lyrics here are either fake, plastic summer-blockbuster patriotic drivel ("When the Eagle Cries", "Declaration Day"), or neutral, by-the-numbers statistics and factoids that serve no real purpose whatsoever (the trilogy at the end, "Waterloo", "Atilla", "Red Baron/Blue Max", etc). Disgraceful.

Don't waste your time with this crap; just go listen to better bands instead. I'll never get the hype around Iced Earth, anyway. Sure, their early stuff was ball-crushing good, but it was nothing revolutionary - just more good US power/thrash metal in the vein of what came before. Why do people flock to this band, when they could be headbanging to some Liege Lord or Heathen or Helstar, the best albums of whom easily destroy anything Iced Earth has ever done? What's the appeal? But hell, either way, Iced Earth reached an all-time low with this one, and I cannot recommend it to anyone. I am just about sick of this pretentious, mundane crap, and I'll be deleting it for good this time. Good fucking riddance.