Iced Earth, Metallica, and Lot’s of Other Metal

Iced Earth, Metallica, and Lot’s of Other Metal

Musically, there is really no difference between Metallica and Iced Earth. Metallica is the original. Iced Earth is the knock off. Iced Earth plays in the style of the albums, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, And Justice for All, and even the black album. However, those aren’t my favorite Metallica albums. My favorite Metallica album has been Kill Em’ All, and for a long time now (I first got that one on cassette tape. That is how old I am). Most Iced Earth songs are in the vein of Metallica’s song Damage Inc. Listening to Iced Earth is like listening to old Metallica songs that never made it on the album. Iced Earth is better than Metallica, faster and better vocals though I like Metallica guitar solos better. Their music is more like Metallica before they were played on the radio.

I haven’t really listened to new Metallica since Load. Sure, I have heard a few songs off their newer stuff like Reload and S&M. It’s crap if you ask me. I have to admit that I liked Hero of the Day, but that was the only song I liked off of Load. It seemed like a good pop song, and I didn’t mind how much airplay it got. It was the best song going at the time on the radio.

I first heard and liked Metallica in 4^th grade (And Justice for All.) I got hooked on Metallica in 8^th grade (black album). I got hooked on lots of other bands then to like Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears and Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind in 8^th grade to. However, my favorite album was probably Ozzy’s Tribute to Randy Rhoads. That year was a real turning point in my life. That is also when I started going to see local hardcore shows as well. Some people said that that the black album was a sellout, but I still remember relating to the song Sad But True at that period of my life when I was chucking apples at the woodpile, watching them explode, out of frustration because I was being bullied. I guess that makes me old, but probably not among their oldest fans. I admit, I haven’t been there listening to Metallica since the beginning.

Metallica didn’t even really mix with Nirvana. I heard Nirvana, and bought Nevermind long before it was on the radio. I remember probably in about 7^th grade requesting to hear Nirvana’s song Territorial Pissings and the dj would not have anything to do with it. That was before Smells Like Teen Spirit was released as a single. Nobody knew what to request off that album then, and probably most hadn’t even heard of it. I heard it on a car trip with some older kids that listened to stuff like S.O.D., Slayer, and Ozzy.

I also heard Rage Against the Machine long before they were popular, and bought their first album too. I distinctly remember trying to sell people on Rage Against the Machine when they were brand new without any luck. That was before they were on MTV, a year later when I was in high school. So, I guess you could say that I was ahead of my time. Most of the kids I grew up with were weaned on the radio, while I had already seriously become jaded by the musical system by the time I reached 8^th grade and didn’t hear either Metallica’s black album, or Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction album on the radio. I had begun studying guitar, so I knew that Metallica was better than what the radio was playing. The only place you would hear Slayer, Testament, or Pantera outside of their concerts and your car was on the Metal Zone on 94HJY out of Providence, late Saturday night (technically Sunday), and my parents made me wake up to go to church though sometimes I would record it, risking getting in trouble from my parents for staying up so late.

I remember the shock of hearing Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on New Jersey’s equivalent to WPXE more than 10 years after it was released back when I was at Rutgers University. It was almost like corporate America admitting that they had made a mistake by not promoting Metallica since Ride the Lightning. WPXE was not yet playing them. Eventually, they went out on a limb and aired that rather weak song, Nothing Else Matters, soon after, even some Megadeth from the rather weak Cryptic Writings album. (Okay, major label back in the Ride the Lightning days, but Sanctuary also was on a major label, so that doesn’t mean anything as far as I am concerned. Metallica for the most part got the shaft of corporate America when I started listening to them. Lots of bands on major labels get dill. For those not in the know, Sanctuary was the predecessor to Nevermore. Nevermore was another one of those bands I had heard of long before they made it to the record store.)

That was because, when I grew up, nobody knew what to do with Metallica or metal at all. Metal was that music that was usually tucked away on Roadrunner Records or Metal Blade, where I can remember checking out Deicide’s Once Upon the Cross, Fear Factory’s Soul of a New Machine, and Sepultura’s Arise when they were all fairly new. Okay, I did listen to Cannibal Corpse, and they got popular in a movie, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, but only as a joke. And, don’t forget Slayer, it’s just that though they play the Comcast Center now, I wasn’t with them from the beginning either.

In high school I was really into metal, not in dress, just the music. I even skipped out on Senior Prom night in order to see GWAR live at Avalon. Now, Avalon is the House of Blues in Boston. I also really liked local bands like Drain, J Base, Eastcide, and Rebound. They often played a local club, The Approach, which went out of business, or various American Legions. Drain had to change their name to Drained when a band on a major label claimed it. These bands just didn’t mix with the other stuff that was out there. There were also a few stirrings about hardcore acts like Earth Crisis. In fact, many of them didn’t even mix with each other.

For some reason a lot of people thought that if you listened to Pantera that you couldn’t and even shouldn’t listen to Iron Maiden, etcetera. If you listened to Earth Crises, then you shouldn’t listen to Judas Priest, etcetera. Headbanger’s Ball was no longer played on MTV. It seemed as if corporate America wanted to phase out metal back then, only later to do a 180 when I was at college. The Ozzfest, which started its annual tour during my senior year of high school, was probably responsible. Yet, by college I was listening to European metal bands like In Flames (I saw them on their first US tour, and started listening to them circa the Whoracle album), Cradle of Filth (I saw them on their first US tour, circa the Cruelty and the Beast album), and Dimmu Borgir (I saw their first US show, and started listening to them circa the Enthrone Darkness Triumphant album). They weren’t getting any major attention either back then. WSOU did give them some attention, but even they were generally only played on an obscure late night show, while they would play Slayer midday. And, there was probably only one record store in all of New Jersey that actually carried this music. By the way I haven’t heard anything good from Cradle of Filth for a while.

College was very different than high school for me. In high school, nobody listened to metal that I was aware of, except me at least. I usually went to shows alone. However, in New Jersey I had a fairly large circle of friends that would frequent concerts in the Philadelphia, New York City, and New Jersey area. And, since this area had so many people, every act that toured always came through.

Then, of course, the thing I had thought I always wanted happened. Metal became popular, except the bands weren’t the old mainstays or even the style I loved. It was Nu Metal. Even WSOU had sold out to nu metal. The old musicians it seemed hated it, except for Ozzy. Ozzy had nu metal at his OzzFests, but my friends and I generally agreed that Ozzy only did this so that he wouldn’t be upstaged by the better acts that we listened to. I couldn’t afford to go to an OzzFest anyway, and plus I’d rather be able to get up close to a band at a smaller venue. That is one reason I have never seen Metallica live either. They have just been too darned expensive for me to consider seeing live. I wouldn’t want to go see them live anyway now because they have too much junk songs published on albums. Even bands that would have never before been found in shopping malls and common record stores eventually showed up everywhere. Newbury Comics in Hyannis, MA didn’t used to carry many of them while I was at college, but eventually I could find them there too. Metal was popular, but it came at a price.

I can’t admit that I have been with Iced Earth since the beginning either. I picked up on them at college. That was when Days of Purgatory was new. I bought it without having ever heard them because one webpage that seemed to give good reviews of metal gave them very high reviews on that one, the new one back then, as well as their other albums. Days of Purgatory got me hooked. I still listen to it. I have to admit that a lot of their music sounds the same to me, but it is good stuff. Later on, after college, when I saw that they had released “The Blessed and the Damned,” I picked that one up too. That’s four disks of Iced Earth. Four disks of them are plenty, for me at least. I saw them live in college at a metal fest in New Jersey. They put on a good act. They played on the main stage, but I read that in Europe they could fill a stadium. However, I am pretty sure that was the same year that Divine Empire played, but on the third stage. I like Divine Empire better though they never really seemed to catch on. They are just too plain heavy to attract a large following. Again, I was going more underground than most people. I can remember God Forbid when they just had a demo out, and I was like one of 4 people at their show.

Midway through college, I had a psychotic episode. I threw out a lot of metal cds though I still held onto a few like Iced Earth, Slayer, and Morbid Angel. I couldn’t really tell fantasy from reality, so I needed to show myself what was real by listening to my parents. I also decided to transfer to a Christian college, Gordon. They wanted to blame the entire episode on the music I listened to. I knew better than that, but if I read the lyrics and I couldn’t tell if it was fantasy or reality, I generally got rid of it. I tried listening to metal bands like Extol, as I had suddenly gone from being very anti-religion to very pro-religion, hyper-religious, but Extol wasn’t really what I was looking for. They were as good as some bands, but they just weren’t my particular taste. At Gordon, I was shocked when I saw a God Forbid album, Determination in the store at a shopping mall. I bought it. In my absence, the bands that I had been listening to who where once nobodies were quickly finding their ways into shopping malls.

Slowly, metal crept back into my life, but old Metallica and Iced Earth were always there for me. Yet, this time metal, at least the less accessible kind, had lost some of its pull of my attention. I was more into bands like Queensryche, Dream Theater, Al di Meola, Greg Howe, Tony MacAlpine, and Planet X (jazzy metal or progressive metal, and not really any death metal). Yeah, and there were a few old ones like Meshuggah and Mercyful Fate. And, yeah, Planet X is hardly accessible for most people, but my wife is a violin and piano player so she knows what is good for the most part.

The heaviest bands once again worked their way out in and out of my cd player. My wife didn’t like the stuff I grew up on. I was also finding that I just couldn’t mix it in well with the other music. Iced Earth and Metallica mix in now, at least according to my wife, but Mercyful Fate and Meshuggah don’t. I think that is because Metallica got some airplay, thus my wife realized they were acceptable, but not because Mercyful Fate, and Meshuggah don’t mix in.

By now I am out of touch with what is new. In fact, I don’t know if anyone is breaking new bands. But, the only time I miss a GWAR show is when I lack the funds. No one puts on a better show than GWAR.