On March 3, singer Matt Barlow retired from one of my favorite Metal bands, Iced Earth.
One rule of life I’d like to subscribe to is that no one is irreplaceable. In the music world at least, this is simply not true. Freddie Mercury’s death was the end of Queen, no question about it. Phil Lynott’s passing ended Thin Lizzy, though they carry on in name these days as a tribute group and nothing more.
Other times, there are members of a group that are great talents, but they leave and the group thinks they can carry on. And they do. Kind of. Bruce Dickinson left Iron Maiden in the early 90s to pursue his solo work and they put out two albums with Blaze Bayley that dropped Maiden off the map. Rob Halford left Judas Priest at a similar point in time, and Priest picked up Ripper Owens to follow a similar career-careening trajectory into irrelevance. It wasn’t that the albums these new singers put out with the old groups were bad, it was just that the frontman was the face and voice that the audience identified with the band’s Brand. Were Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford technically irreplaceable? Nope. But really….yeah, you can’t replace them and expect to remain commercially viable as a band.
So it was with a bit of resignation as I mulled over the career highlights of Matt Barlow and Iced Earth, and realized that Barlow’s second exit was the end of Iced Earth as a viable commercial entity. I hadn’t quite put Barlow into that same lofty group with guys like Bruce Dickinson. After all, Iced Earth was not the world famous mega group. But they had a blue-chip, world-class singer and frontman. They had a rhythm guitar player that was top-notch. They put out one of the finest live chronicles in heavy metal history in 1999, the sublime Alive In Athens. With respect to John Cusack, they were young, they had momentum.
It is easy to glide over a group’s discography, note the highs and lows, find a place to orient yourself and move on. But Alive In Athens is one of those rare albums that many bands don’t have: a pitch-perfect, comprehensive time capsule of a band that’s captured a golden moment in time where the line-up is perfect, the performances are perfect and the great bulk of the bands catalog is represented in one package. Listening to this show, one is amazed to find it gets better as time passes. It’s a euphoric, three disc adrenaline rush, even if there is a small part of my mind that was always worried.
It will never get any better than this for these guys. How could it? Nowhere to go but down, Jack.
The follow-up album in 2001 did not fail. Horror Show maintained the momentum. Then 9/11 happened. Barlow left the band soon after, citing the event and wanting to do…something. That something turned into a law enforcement career. Amidst all of the tragedy and violence and horror of that event, it’s the small, selfish things that ripple out and affect you in small but significant ways. My favorite metal singer left. That momentum got all broken up, and they never got it back.
Now they have hired a singer but the name of Stu Block, the former frontman for a band called Into Eternity. He is a fine singer, but for me it just comes back to that damn Brand thing again. Iced Earth was Jon Schaffer’s taut triplet rhythm playing, second only to Metallica’s James Hetfield; more importantly, it was Matt Barlow’s distinct voice, by turns ferocious and reflective. It was a realization that yes, Barlow is irreplaceable. For better or worse, it was a powerhouse tag team. It was a moment in time. And it’s a chapter for one of my favorite metal bands that’s closing.
