Under No Illusion: An Interview with Iced Earth, pt.2

artist website

publisher

buy

Jon Schaffer (guitar) & Stu Block (vocals)

Part 2

Iced Earth may indeed be moving forward with their new singer, but to what, will be the question on most fans’ minds, and after a period of such near-constant change, if this is to be the stability the band has needed for the last decade, what is that stability going to sound like? There’d be no point making it sound the same as before. Jon Schaffer’s creative side wouldn’t allow that, and the band’s real fans wouldn’t appreciate it either.

“It feels heavier because it’s more focused and a much simpler production in the songs and their arrangements,” states Jon, enthusiastic as ever, “They’re not simple to play, it’s very challenging stuff to play, especially the rhythm section stuff, and the vocals I’m sure, I couldn’t sing like that! I actually cleaned up my guitar sound quite a bit. It’s a much cleaner sound than there’s been since Horror Show, and that makes it more punchy-sounding, and it allows the bass more room to exist in the mix, and the drums are very punchy also, we really worked on that. The whole idea was to kind of make this a balls-deep metal album, and not so much the theatrics and over-the-top tracking over everything. There was definitely a conscious effort to kind of get back to the roots.”

Though not a theatrical production, Dystopia does have the unifying theme implied by the title, each track being about a variation of a future society, either based on a movie along those lines, or an idea of Jon’s. And rightly the title track is the one both Jon and Stu feel is the defining track of the album; “Dystopia is one of my favourites because it’s got everything that an Iced Earth song should have. It’s a real opener. I think the last two albums didn’t have good openers. They were OK, but not amazing. On the whole Framing… I think is better than Crucible…, but Dystopia has the right vibe and the right energy to start off the album. It showcases a lot of cool qualities of Stu’s voice. You have the vitriol in the verses, the angry, raspy middle-voice, you’ve got the Halford-like highs, you’ve got the pre-chorus then you’ve got the chorus which is just hugely melodic and shows off his real big chest-voice. You get all those colours in one five-minute song.” With Stu in complete agreement he returns the compliment, “And the riffing on that song is amazing. I think everything about that song is on-point for what Iced Earth should be. I’ve been a fan of Iced Earth for a long time. Being a metalhead, how can you not? I’ve listened to the albums and that song pin-points it for sure.”

“ There was definitely a conscious effort to kind of get back to the roots ”
- Jon Schaffer

The track is indeed a blistering introduction to the album, a familiar marching drum giving way to Stu’s pained scream and a massive riff. It sets the tone of the disc, but doesn’t necessarily define every track on it. “I would say for something that’s different to any of the other albums is a song like Tragedy And Triumph,” Jon explains, “It’s a major key, very positive sounding, uplifting almost, and that’s kinda different for Iced Earth. It’s a good way to close the album. It’s the first album that hasn’t had a big epic as the closer. It’s just a cool vibe to it, it’s got a positive message to it, and it’s related to the first song. You have two very different things. You’ve got the intro, the opening of the whole thing, is the snare drums as the train’s coming to take the people away, and you have the human emancipation in Tragedy And Triumph, so it’s kind of the victory march instead of the tyranny march.”

Jon is well known for being a musician full of ideas in terms of song content and subject matter, protectively so at times, which as Stu suggests must be a very intimidating environment for even longer-term band members to be a part of, let alone new guys. “There’s always ideas happening, there’s always something going on, it’s not difficult or anything. It’s maybe a little bit intimidating. I didn’t know what to expect overall, but there’s so much going on that sometimes your brain has to process it all in different ways, and I think dealt with it in a way that meant I just put my catchers glove on and whatever they threw at me, I try and get it, man. That’s basically how I viewed it. I mean Jon, he was doing two albums really at that time – he was doing Sons of Liberty stuff – so on the table for him was intense. He was juggling all this stuff that I couldn’t even fathom dealing with that. But there’s so many ideas and things going on that I just absorbed it.”

“Dude, this is the kind of music he should have been doing all along,” offers Jon, “I said that to him right at the beginning. You deserve the big leagues. There’s so many guys that do the death metal thing, and it’s cool, and we use that texture in a couple of parts, it’s cool to have that. He’s gonna step up into the big leagues now I think. They’re gonna talk about Dickinson and Halford and Dio. And Matt. And Stu. And it’s gonna take a few albums, I think, before it really sinks in, but that’s what’s gonna happen.”

“ Since I started hanging out with Jon I’ve been educated even more about what’s going on ”
- Stu Block

Having Stu’s death metal vocals at their disposal does give them an extra dynamic that they perhaps didn’t have before, but fans will probably be relieved to learn that it’s kept to a minimum, and used when it suits the music. “On Dystopia there’s, not a death metal scream, but a sort of a scream right at the beginning of a tormented person being taken onto a train and being shaved and micro-chipped,” adds Stu, which sets Jon off laughing “That’s your future, bitches! Wake up!”.

Dystopia, as already mentioned, is packed with ideas of humanity’s future, and Stu was able to help develop those. “I had quite a lot of input. Since I started hanging out with Jon I’ve been educated even more about what’s going on. I live in Canada, so I live in an igloo, I don’t have TV. I’m kidding, but we are still feeling the pinch.” Jon is known as an intense, incredibly serious guy, misrepresented often as difficult, but that’s really not the case. He can’t help but chip in again at this point; “His Dad still hunts baby seals. With his fists, not baseball bats. You gotta do that shit right, man.”

Stu tries to continue amidst the laughter, “The vision I have now of my father beating a baby seal with his bare hands. That’s an interesting one. No, he’s opened my eyes to what’s going on. It’s scary. He’s given me several books, and instead of watching a horror movie now I’m watching a documentary. It’s pretty cool. There’s a lot of scary shit that’s going on and it’s happening not only in America but it’s happening all over the world. And knowledge it power, it’s always been the same, and if you are knowledgeable and know the history, as Jon has said before, they wrote the playbook and we just gotta read it because it’s history repeating itself.”

And of course Jon is well known for putting his views on liberty, government and tyranny across via his Sons of Liberty project, which will see the light of day again at the end of the year, but first Iced Earth will commence the first of many tour legs on what will be their biggest ever tour, which will include Fury UK plus another to-be-confirmed support band on the UK dates. Jon elaborates, “It’s the biggest European tour we’ve done and we are going to be doing a real world tour this time. North America, Central America, South America, India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan. Yeah, we’re goin’ in.”

After 25 years Iced Earth are only now undertaking a full-scale world tour, and Jon squarely blames himself for not achieving that over the last decade or so, “I was in a funk and just burnt out for the last several years. I’ve just been disconnected from Iced Earth. Just going through the motions, not really what it should be. And I take responsibility for that. I’m the captain of the ship. If shit goes wrong it’s my fault. It’s not that it’s been terrible. We’ve still had a lot of success, but the band could have gone way further, and it will now.”

A lot rests on this album and this tour, then. The band are due to start rehearsals soon, but Stu has already started privately, “I have a lot of stuff to learn. I was doing it at my house for a while but the neighbours started knocking on the door. So I have a little rehearsal spot that I go to and I pipe the stuff through the PA and I sing at full voice and pretend like there’s 50,000 people there.” And as for the setlist, Jon suggests it will be one to look forward to, but isn’t giving too much away at this stage, “We have a big surprise coming, but I can’t tell you now. We’re digging back into the back catalogue. We’ve been stuck in nostalgia mode since Matt came back, and there’s so much from the Iced Earth catalogue, but the problem is we can’t get together and rehearse because we’re doing this show here and this festival, but we’re not getting together as a band and really jamming. So we’re gonna go in and do some stuff from the back catalogue that we haven’t done for a long time. And we are going to do a lot from the new album because it’s strong, and even if the people haven’t heard it by the time we go on tour it’s so hooky that they’ll get it live. I’d say between five and seven songs probably.”

The European tour finishes in early December, and Jon will immediately follow it up by releasing a new Sons of Liberty EP. But other activities, for both men, are on hold as Iced Earth is their primary focus for the foreseeable future. “I’m not doing Into Eternity anymore,” confirms Stu, “I mean, I can’t, it’s just not possible. This is my band now.” And for Jon there’s the ever-present promise of more music from his collaboration with Blind Guardian front-man Hansi Kursch, Demons & Wizards. “Hansi and I actually together in Germany rehearsing for the album. We did album rehearsals for a week and a half or so before we started cutting drum tracks. We wanna do it, we know there’s a big demand, but it’s a time issue. Iced Earth is my priority and obviously Blind Guardian is his priority. We’ll do albums for the rest of our lives. But that may only be two albums. I hope it’s not that long, but we’ll have to see. What we want to do this time is write it in person, not through the mail. We want to be together and vibing off of each other.”

“ I’m the captain of the ship. If shit goes wrong it’s my fault ”
- Jon Schaffer

But first is that Sons of Liberty EP, a subject still very dear to Jon’s heart two years after its inception; “That’s really important because it’s keeping the brush-fires burning, as it were. There’s a big following of Sons of Liberty going on, it’s a movement, revolutionary kind of stuff, getting people to inform themselves and get involved in what’s happening around them. It’s been a big wake-up call for a lot of people. We’ve got chapters all around the world where activists are rallying around the music and using it as a weapon against tyranny, which is what it is. It doesn’t have anything to do with America. It’s not right-wing or left-wing. It’s just exposing the criminals in government, the fraudulent financial system and who’s really running the show. It’s actually a pretty strong weapon against the globalists because it sparks ideas. And they hate that. People say to me ‘man, how did you know all this like two years ago?’ I don’t have a crystal ball, I know the enemy playbook. They told us what they’re doing, you just gotta pay attention. You have the criminal media, the controlled media that’s controlled by the bad people, and you’re going to have an uninformed population that’s willing to go along with all kinds of tyranny. It’s a shit sandwich that’s being sold as a fucking BLT.”

It’s an intense subject, and one for another time, because right now the focus is Iced Earth’s big return. Dystopia will be released towards the end of October as a regular CD, a digipak CD with three bonus tracks, and a limited edition box set containing the digipak, a belt buckle, lighter, wristband, patch, beer coaster and three button badges. Iced Earth are on tour throughout Europe from October 30 through December 12. The other legs of the tour, hitting all of the territories Jon mentioned, will be announced soon to take place in 2012.

« Read part 1

Photo(s): Andy Lye

Written by Andy Lye
More: Interviews, Iced Earth