Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Zagreb / Pogon Jedinstvo / Croatia
Concert date: January 25, 2014
Attendance: 800
If Iced Earth come to Ljubljana, why not (slightly stalker-style) follow them, first a good hundred kilometers, then another almost six hundred, deep into the Balkan peninsula? After the Ljubljana show, the tour took the American band to two more capitals of our former shared homeland, starting with the Croatian metropolis. The dates for Zagreb and Sarajevo were friendly, since I only had to take one day off work, Iced Earth are a band that knows how to blow you away live, and Sarajevo is an attractive city I’d never managed to visit. There were more than enough reasons for a nearly three-day concert getaway, and our odyssey kicked off with a departure from Ljubljana in the late afternoon.
The Iced Earth show in Zagreb felt like »The Drawing of the Three«, in the style of the book from Stephen King’s cult saga The Dark Tower. They pulled us through a door from the real world into their musical one. That door was Zagreb’s Pogon Jedinstvo, the big brother of the neighboring Močvara hall, which was already almost jam-packed shortly after eight, so the first band on had the privilege of playing to a crowd of several hundred.
The Australians Elm Street didn’t totally win me over in Ljubljana, but they left just enough of an impression that I was ready to give them a second chance. Sadly, thanks to a slight delay, our trio rolled into rainy Zagreb just in time for the band’s last two songs. Still, it was easy to hear that Elm Street’s sound was excellent, the energy on stage was just as unleashed as in Ljubljana, and the crowd didn’t hold back either. The Melbourne boys easily carried some heavy metal heat into cold Zagreb, and the band didn’t buckle in front of the big stage and an even fuller hall than the day before.
Warbringer also charged onto the stage like a Sherman tank and convinced even more than the day before. Mainly thanks to the excellent sound: crystal clear, yet angry, raw and brutal. Ben Mottsman’s bass rattled like a Thompson submachine gun somewhere in the middle of the Pacific in 1942, Anderson pounded the drums like Angry Birds pounding pigs, and the Lemus/Carroll guitar duo popped over the riffs like howitzers. Over the instrumental foursome, the psychotic John Kevill growled and foamed like a rabid bulldog, coming across live like the sadistic, uncompromising lunatic Gunnery Sgt. Hartman from Kubrick’s classic Full Metal Jacket. Warbringer wowed us again, proved that modern thrash lives mostly thanks to them, and said goodbye to the Croatian crowd, who whipped up no shortage of toxic circle pits, with the serpent tower from their latest record, Towers of the Serpent. The album got the internal, unofficial title Towels of the Serpent that very same day, and it stuck for the next few days.
Iced Earth hit the Zagreb crowd just like the Ljubljana one, with the pompous title track of the new studio album, and the crowd was eating out of their hands from the first note. They sounded anything but tired. Quite the opposite, in fact, because the band delivered another fantastic show. Block shone again, becoming a real frontman with just the right stage charisma and, even more importantly, a voice that gives you goosebumps all over. In Block’s vocal escapades, he confidently pulls off both the highest screams and the ominous baritone, and you can easily picture, before your eyes and in your ears, the golden years of the band, which Iced Earth are obviously heading toward, slowly but surely. No point wasting words on Schaffer’s proverbially brutal right hand, and in Zagreb too the hall came most alive and exploded into an ecstasy of mass singing during the poisonous crushers from Something Wicked This Way Comes. The only thing that bugged me was the excessive moshing, which doesn’t really belong at Iced Earth shows, despite their at times brutal crushing power. Behind the kit, the infallible Jon Dette shone again, and you can’t tell at all that he only started practicing some of the songs during the tour. After Richard Christy, Dette is without a doubt the band’s greatest drummer, and I hope it stays that way, at least for the next album, so we can hear what he brings to the studio. The young but self-assured Luke Appleton is becoming an almost indispensable member. On stage he brings the biggest surplus of energy, and he wins people over most by reliably delivering extremely faithful backing vocals, which in many places completely fill out the sound. Probably mainly because of the bigger and louder crowd compared with Ljubljana, after a melodramatic and once again gorgeous rendition of the unforgettable ballad Watching Over Me, Iced Earth hit us with the aggressive Iced »motherfuckin’« Earth to close, giving Zagreb the little treat we missed in Šiška.
After the show came the obligatory swapping of impressions, bragging about our plastic catches, handshakes, a souvenir photo and farewell to the Slovenian crew, who left us with a fourth son, lost until Zagreb. Our road led us south through the night to the Stara Gradiška border crossing, and after crossing it we entered unknown territory. In the early morning hours, already in Banja Luka, we turned off the wide highway onto a pothole-ridden gravel road, and then, over countless serpentines and lonely roads (with a crazy driver, it was better to just sleep through it, hehe), we kept steadily closing in on our final, exciting destination, Sarajevo, where a third encounter with the band awaited us…
Setlist
ICED EARTH:
1. Plagues Of Babylon
2. Democide
3. Dark Saga
4. V
5. If I Could See You
6. Disciples Of The Lie
7. Among The Living Dead
8. Burning Times
9. Red Baron / Blue Max
10. Blessed Are You
11. Vengeance Is Mine
12. Cthulhu
13. My Own Saviour
14. The End
15. Question Of Heaven
—encore—
16. Dystopia
17. Watching Over Me
18. Iced Earth
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