Iced Earth - The Blessed and the Damned

Genre metal Publisher Century Media External Links Iced Earth Century Media

It's absolutely incredible that Iced Earth has managed to survive for so long. After all, when their fist album was released in 1991, it came at the worst possible time for a metal band. With the grunge fad completely demolishing the commercial popularity of heavy metal music, from the teased-haired glam rockers to the streetwise thrash metalers, it quickly faded from the public eye, heading underground. The situation for Iced Earth was far more daunting, however; with bearded, introspective, flannel-clad rock dominating the music scene, there was no way in hell a classic power metal band who sound like they came straight out of 1985 could possibly succeed.

Shamelessly retro, Iced Earth have always been one of the most uncool, yet oddly endearing bands in metal. Throughout the 1990s, as Napalm Death and Morbid Angel pioneered grindcore, Carcass and At the Gates redefined death metal, and Pantera and Sepultura paved the way for the late-90s nu-metal onslaught, Iced Earth, led by intrepid guitarist/songwriter Jon Schaffer, remained comfortably in their mid-80s world, singing epic songs about horror movies and mythology. Today, ten (ten!) albums later, Iced Earth is still going strong, and despite a lineup that's rotated so much it would make Spinal Tap dizzy, they're not stopping anytime soon. There's no better time than the present to release a career retrospective, and the band's new best-of package is the perfect chance for erstwhile fans of old-school metal to discover one of the genre's most underrated acts.

For the most part, The Blessed and the Damned is an excellent, exhaustive introduction to Iced Earth. Why some songs are on the "Blessed" disc, and some are on the "Damned" disc are anyone's guess, and the lack of a chronological track listing makes it next to impossible to gauge the band's progress over the years, but the songs that have been chosen are all evenly divided from the band's first six studio albums, the Alive in Athens live album, and the 2003 compilation Days of Purgatory (which had the band re-recording their early material). There are plenty of aggressive tracks that hearken back to the glory days of Manowar, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden (complete with the delicious bombast that comes with the genre that is power metal), best exemplified by "Wolf", "The Hunter", "Stormrider", and "Iced Earth", but it's the more melodic fare where Schaffer and his cohorts shine the best. Songs like "Melancholy (Holy Martyr)", "Watching Over Me", and "I Died For You" contain terrific vocal work by singer Matthew Barlow, complete with the kind of soaring, emotional choruses that audiences love.

If there's one major complaint, it's that the full capacity of the two CD set is not used. With both discs clocking in at a little over an hour each, that leaves over 30 minutes of empty space that could have easily been filled. One aspect of Iced Earth's music that is ignored on this compilation is their expertise at crafting epic songs, and there's room for two of the most popular songs in the band's catalog, the monstrous 1995 track "Dante's Inferno", and 1998's "Something Wicked (Trilogy)". Aside from that (and perhaps the exclusion of their ballad "A Question of Heaven"), The Blessed and the Damned is a very well-assembled collection, complete with gorgeous cover artwork and extensive liner notes and commentary by Schaffer. In 2004, the Iced Earth lineup continues to rotate (former Judas Priest stand-in Ripper Owens is the band's third lead singer), but as long as Schaffer's around, the band will soldier on, and contemporary metal is all the better for it.