The Glorious Burden

I learned something a while ago: to get the best possible results out of using the Metal Archives, one must at all times remain alert and know what to do. The lesson was provided by a chunk of industrial-grade Cheddar they call The Glorious Burden by Iced Earth, and I still don't know whether to be grateful or pissed off for learning things the hard way. To shed light on the hard and painful but possibly useful experience, we must go back in time.

Our story began on a sunny spring day about five months ago. I found the Glorious Burden at a bargain price, and rushed to check the band on the MA. Genre: Power/thrash. Ratings: well over 80% on the average. Conclusion: thrashy and worth buying with the 8€ price tag. Yes, I trust the archive, and a bunch of select reviewers that much, thank you. I went back and picked up a copy. And damn, I did the wrong thing. In the right supermarket those 8 euros could have provided me with up to 16 bottles of beer, or a twelwe-pack, a beef heart to eat and a nice evening with a movie. But no, I had to waste money, time, and a perfect evening of beer and cow innards to purchase this stillborn piece of melodramatic and pseudo-patriotic art of cashing in. To explain the festering blob of frustration inside me, I guess I must describe the album and the feelings it awoke deep in my mind. Sigh.

The CD I have doesn't have either the Star-Spangled Banner or the Green Face, so probabaly it is a european version. Which is good, there's less of it. In the additional notes of the album's entry in the MA it says: "Because of the album's super-patriot theme, some tracks weren't added to versions released in certain countries." Now, that gives a hint on one of the problems I have while listening to The Glorious Burden, the excessive infusion of supposedly patriotic crap. Musically that would be a minor detail, if we were talking about Nile or Iron Maiden, but we are not. If the album was by Nile, it would not matter, because it's possible to sing about anything in Nile's style, and the audience doesn't give a crap, since they don't understand a word without being handed the lyrics in writing. Iron Maiden, on the other hand, has the required skill to execute this kind of theme properly; they would not turn the patriotic stories into emotionally unreal, pathetic crap. No, Iron Maiden would pack some serious heavy metal into it, and make it into another Trooper or Aces High, and not sound like they were trying to act a crying scene in a school play. Iced Earth has used the patriotic theme to turn the album into a plastic copy of emotion in the very same way that has become the classic reason for people to claim that America's culture is shallow and valueless. But more of the theme and lyrics later; let's take a look at the music and see what the other problems are.

The album's first track, Declaration Day, already killed my high expectations with its overacted sentimentality, and left me wondering the value of my purchase. All right, if the album is a theme work on patriotic things, such as the Civil War, one song packed with pathetic attempt at defiant emotion and bleeding-heart patriotic feeling must be allowed. I would rather have had a metal song, but sometimes the first track is just an extended intro. Move on, move on, there's nothing of value to hear here.

The second track, When the Eagle Cries, comes next. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the biggest, most useless piece of cheesy crap anything with the word "metal" in it has ever created. This song should be performed by some super-star... say... Barry Manilow. He would sing it in a let's-remember-the-dead-and-pretend-we-care gala evening, televised and with a $2800 dinner price tag. Someone would first give a touching speech, trying to seem sombre and emotional, but looking throughout like a beaten basset hound with drooping eyes and a hanging face. Then Barry would appear in the single spotlight, wearing a white tuxedo and playing the first weeping notes on a 47-foot ivory grand piano with seven hundred candles on the top of it. Soon the spotlight would grow larger, and reveal first an assisting barber-shop quartet, then a string quintet. Along with the progess of the magnificient show, the increasing lights would reveal an angel choir of three hundred African-American ladies averaging 380 pounds in gross tonnage, dressed in red, white and blue and set up to look like the Star-Spangled Banner from afar. There could possibly be a very disturbing amateur ballet interpretation of the Battle of Gettysburg, with an obviously sexually twisted sextet of men perfoming a touching re-enactment of the generals' anxieties with erect bayonets on their plastic muskets. The tempo and the spectacularity of the show would intensify with the battalion-sized marching band with a bag-piper company attached, and finally a kiloton's worth of fireworks and an overflight by the Blue Angels would bring in the grand finale and Saddam would be executed live... Holy shit, can someone actually listen to this with a straight face? If any of my relatives had died in the WTC, I would possibly sue the band; this is either a display of very bad taste and childishness, or a ruthless attempt to cash in on the surge of patriotic emotions of the post-9/11 USA. As a band from the US, Iced Earth may have the right to artistically pee on the graves of the WTC victims, but on the whole this should count as blasphemy. This truly, truly sucks. Painful.

After When the Eagle Cries the band really has little chance of salvaging the album. They have wandered into the Twilight Zone warehouse with the WTC snow globes, posters of eagles shedding bitter tears and star-spangled fruitcakes. I have tried to listen to the rest of the album by skipping the two songs in the beginning, but the memory of the piece of cheese emerges too often from the general atmosphere of the album. The rest of the tracks are a little less annoying than The Cheddar, but a few general observations are necessary.

First of all, the quality of the lyrics as a whole is somewhere below D. There should be an International Treaty of Military Lyrics (ITML). The treaty, signed by everybody, except possibly by China and Peru, would prohibit writing martial metal lyrics without a licence. The licence could only be aquired by attending a rigorous training administered by Bruce Dickinson, and any unlicenced lyrics would be brought before an International Metal Inquisition with an itchy guillotine-finger. I mean, who the hell approved the lyrics of Red Baron/Blue Max and Valley Forge? Or even Waterloo, which by the way is the musical high point of the album, a pretty nicely driving song? This is minor league show-and-tell stuff. The Gettysburg trilogy in the end of the album is not much better; you cannot instill a feeling of fear, anxiety or elation in battle by clinically describing the events. Painful decisions are made, a stonewalling certainty and determination are voiced, but still the whole falls into a cesspool of fake sentimentality. Even worse, the lyrics contain dialogues between the persons in the battle, but are performed by the one and the same singer. Maybe King Diamond could pull it off (he's done it before, in his own eccentric style, on Abigail, for example), but it still would not be a good idea. Nope, this is not even close to Dickinson's quality. The sentence is swift decapitation, followed by blissful oblivion.

Second, the music itself is not anything to marvel at. I admit that as a thrash and death metal fan I'm not too familiar with Power Metal in general, and so far I haven't heard any power metal I'd rate above 90% ("Paradigma" by Tad Morose actually comes close), but this just does not work. If this is supposed to be power metal, where the hell are the power and the metal? There are riffs, but nothing to stick in the memory, except one brief part in the Trilogy. The vocals are overdone, Mr. Halford has already brought this style to its logical conclusion, and nobody really has a chance of ever surpassing him. The rest is just indifferent. Practically every song has a slow beginning or a slow part somewhere, and something faster, as a kind of a "glory ride" attempt. Possibly they've tried to create a contrast of metal and slower parts and use it as a tool for emphasising emotions, but the attempt does not deliver the expected results. Sometimes -at it's best- the album tries to sound like an Iron Maiden album, sometimes there are elements of Judas Priest. Quite often the music slips out of metal and simply becomes boring mid-tempo rock.

The trilogy is another low point on several counts. First of all, the combined death toll of the Gettysburg battle was something on the order of eight or nine thousand, not counting those who, as was the habit at those times, died of infections months later. There's no point in talking about 50000 bodies littering the ground. If we exclude civilians and WWII bombings, such numbers are reserved for the first day of Somme in WWI, Cannae (216 BC) and Borodino in 1812. The total CASUALTY toll was 51000, but a good portion of those walked/crawled/were carried away, still breathing. This is one of the things that Dickinson would not screw up. In military language "casualty" does not equal "dead".

While I strongly dislike the dialogues and the general stupidity of the chosen way to approach the subject, the music itself is another mountaintop of sentimental bullshit. The glory ride surfaces more than once, and the Hollywood-tinted heaviness of heart of the generals and troops desperately tries to find a way to manifest itself. I have a hypothesis about the birth of this painfully amusing half an hour: the band has been spending the evening in a way usual to a close circle of friends. As the drill goes, they bring pizza, snacks, two six-packs for everyone, and one of them has even brought a new girlfriend. Then they shove the rented movie in the DVD player, and start watching the Gettysburg movie; it had to be chosen because they couldn't agree on either National Treasure or the Blade III, and had to consider the new girlfriend whom they don't yet know well enough to rent Dawn of the Dead. And since someone has a new girlfriend and has to behave, and another dude is on antibiotics for an ingrown toenail, Mr. Schaffer ends up drinking 3½...4½ six-packs and most of the two rounds of tequila. He wakes up the next morning, extremely hung over and with a "good" idea about a magnificient musical masterpiece, equivivalent of the works of Wagner, and sets forth creating the symphonic Mount Rushmore to honor the dead heroes, both the fallen of 1863 and those killed in the WTC. And then he forces the idea and the compositions on the rest of the band in the classical "We MUST play the Jazz Odyssey!" way. The trilogy actually tries to recreate the atmosphere of the movie, which already in itself is a monumentally crappy big-budget Hollywood product. Yup, this is either a miserably bad interpretation of patriotism or an attempt to finally pay the rest of the mortgage on Schaeffer's new house.

The trilogy has a sound that makes it resemble a live recording. Listen to the lenghty instrumental parts with the symphony orchestra, close your eyes, and imagine a scene similar to S&M by you-know-who, and it's right there; the music somehow lags its feet behind, and there's a spark missing. It would be excellent for a live DVD, but just mediocre and uninspiried on a studio album. All the way throughout the album the guitar sound would need some serious weight. As it is, the guitar sounds nondescript and unnoticeable.

Now, let's go for the very specific part of this review that will finally guarantee that some of you will hate me afterwards: The theme of the album, patriotism. It is not a bad thematic choice in itself. Nope, I must stress it's the execution of the idea that sucks, not the theme itself. Overt sentimentality, and worship of those who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good and ideals, are familiar to those of us who are older than 30 years. Yes, the Soviet Union had similar propaganda. If someone became a "hero" by falling in the line of duty, and died for the ideology, it was a glorious thing to do. Just remember the WWII propaganda shots of a bright-eyed young lieutenant with fair slavic features, already wounded in previous engagements, rising up from the trench with the pistol above his head, to lead a daring infantry assault against the Nazi tyranny, obviously knowing the danger the opposing pair of MG42s presents, but leading the way with the endless bravery of his self-sacrificing righteousness, supplied by both the hate for the injustices inflicted upon his motherland by the spiteful enemy and the burning idealism inside his young chest. That's the way to make young, iconic, and very much dead heroes. And unfortunately, Iced Earth has found the same aesthetic vision. No, Iced Earth are of course not communists, they just worship the idea of independence, and especially war for independence, with the same iconography. Valley Forge is is one of the focal points of this unquestioning, bright-eyed stupidity. There is some sort of exploitation going on here, and it might be a patriotic idealism, which would mean the album is just propaganda. Or it could be cashing in, since this, I believe, is the way to make money out of the fundamentally useless War on Terror. I think that in the long run, the latter would be the better choice for Iced Earth. If I was an artist of any kind, I would not want to be labelled as a supporter of a war that has resulted in my country killing many times the number of our dead in children alone. Bombing the crap out of Bagdad's suburbs is not the high road to take. No, that's a way to xerox terrorists. If an average American gets his whole family killed by a foreigner, does he sit down and think that he has lost and there's nothing he can do, and that the enemy is undefeatable? No, according to the Hollywood lore, he rides forth to avenge the dead. Who ever thought that an iraqi man who has lost his family in random bombings, and has nothing to lose any more, does not want to do the same? The US is shooting itself in the foot with the goofy war, and Iced Earth wants to become a mannequin for the whole process. Shit. I think the thematic formula, when done like this, is idiotic. If they really are this patriotic, why not enlist instead of spoiling the good name of metal? That would be doing something. They even promise that "if need be, we'll die free". I say feel free to do that, please... I'm sorry for this incoherent outburst of political ranting in a metal context, but Iced Earth started it, not me. With When The Eagle Cries, their patriotic work turns into politics, whether or not they intended it. I'll be waiting for a flood of hatemail now. PM me, please, I won't give you my email address.

So, then something completely different: To finally complete my lecture about the use of the Archive, take heed of the following advice: Find a few reviewers whose opinions you respect, i.e. reviewers who you agree with. When making the decision whether to buy an album or not, try to find the said persons' thoughts about it, if they are available. The average rating, even with a large number of reviews, can be misleading; people tend to review the stuff they like, and the dissenting voices drown in the worshipping white noise of the unquestioningly eager masses. Usually I've followed this procedure to the last letter, but this time I was in hurry, and looked at the average of all Iced Earth albums in the MA, not Glorious Burden alone. Had I read the few disagreeing reviews from certain people, I would have been warned, and the choice would have been an album by Death instead of this. And to be honest, I've based something in between 30 and 50 purchases on the MA reviews so far, The Glorious Burden being the first real mistake. So, the Archive actually works, at least for me. And no, don't think I'm offering myself as one of the trusted reviewers. No, I wouldn't trust myself in such a serious matter.

Usually, if and when dealing out ratings below 40%, I'd be inclined to getting rid of the album afterwards. But not this time: I'm going to keep this one for the special entertainment value it holds. A friend of mine has a David Hasselhof CD hidden somewhere among his other CDs. When a boozing evening has progressed beyond a certain amount of alcohol, someone (quite often me...) always manages to find it and shove it in the player, always just to annoy everybody else. If David Hasselhof's singing sounds good, you know it's time to stop drinking for the evening. The Glorious Burden will become my version of David Hasselhof, and provide some sarcastic fun for drunken people in the future. That's how bad it is.