A review of 'Horror Show' from Bravewords.com:
ICED EARTH Horror Show (Century Media)
The cool thing about Iced Earth has, as of late, been the tag-team serious metalness of the long-locked duo locking devil horns up front with your inner headbanger. Yes, make the sign of the hammer for Matt Barlow and Jon Schaffer, a pair of unreal(istic) rock stars (God luv 'em) who can deliver a grand flourish with suburban metalfest panache. Iced Earth's form of power metal, something they'd been doing far before it became hip, always sounds like a struggle to get out, like there is tension, friction, as if the relationship between the bass player and the guitar player is... wait, that's the twelfth horror story condensed on this album. In any event, Jon and Matt seem to pour it out for you, like Nevermore, like Virgin Steele, like Manowar, really, more metal than any of those bands because they live in the brown pig pen muck of a derided and chided metal sub-genre, a power metal that is not pretty. Lyrically, I don't really buy all this stuff about these movie monsters being metaphors for actions and reactions in greater society. It's really a hokey device. But again, it just plays to the fact of surrender, giving up all pretense for a wallow among the hopelessly metal-obsessed: we are one of you, one, two, three, four, let it rock, which Iced Earth do, dancing on the razor's edge of collapse, urgently pushing these stuttering galloping crypt-kickers with a lurch over the wall, again, never efficiently, always with well-worn parts grinding steel on steel, Matt caught in the industrial age cogs and howling over the pain.
8.5 Martin Popoff
ICED EARTH Horror Show (Century Media)
The cool thing about Iced Earth has, as of late, been the tag-team serious metalness of the long-locked duo locking devil horns up front with your inner headbanger. Yes, make the sign of the hammer for Matt Barlow and Jon Schaffer, a pair of unreal(istic) rock stars (God luv 'em) who can deliver a grand flourish with suburban metalfest panache. Iced Earth's form of power metal, something they'd been doing far before it became hip, always sounds like a struggle to get out, like there is tension, friction, as if the relationship between the bass player and the guitar player is... wait, that's the twelfth horror story condensed on this album. In any event, Jon and Matt seem to pour it out for you, like Nevermore, like Virgin Steele, like Manowar, really, more metal than any of those bands because they live in the brown pig pen muck of a derided and chided metal sub-genre, a power metal that is not pretty. Lyrically, I don't really buy all this stuff about these movie monsters being metaphors for actions and reactions in greater society. It's really a hokey device. But again, it just plays to the fact of surrender, giving up all pretense for a wallow among the hopelessly metal-obsessed: we are one of you, one, two, three, four, let it rock, which Iced Earth do, dancing on the razor's edge of collapse, urgently pushing these stuttering galloping crypt-kickers with a lurch over the wall, again, never efficiently, always with well-worn parts grinding steel on steel, Matt caught in the industrial age cogs and howling over the pain.
8.5 Martin Popoff
