Judas Priest Discography Discussion (part 2 starting page 20)

Alone is beautiful but I’ve developed a real fondness for Nostradamus, clunky and overlong as it is. I prefer it to the last two because it has some ambition
 
MrKnickerbocker said:
Also the best song on the debut album (and the only one worth playing still).
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I prefer the title track to it, but those two are the only songs which I like from the debut - the weakest album with Rob imo and they have much better deep cuts to play live. Btw, did you know Adrian wanted to do a cover of the title track back in his days with Urchin.
 
The first Priest cover of ''Diamonds & Rust'' was recorded during the SWOD sessions (1975), but it was included as a bonus song for the 1987 remaster of Rocka Rolla. There are some differences from the SAS version, right? Here it is:

 
Sin After Sin (1977)
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I find it amazing how these guys debuted around the same time as AC/DC and KISS, hit the scene before Van Halen, have been a contemporary act to Thin Lizzy during their heyday, are about to release their 19th album in less than a month and still going strong!

Sin After Sin being their first album on a major label (Columbia), their final with the old logo in cursive and their only album with drummer Simon Phillips, interestingly, in my opinion, was a turning point for the band in terms of musicality. Though Phillips' only album with band, his double-bass drumming definitely shaped Priest's future sound and to an extent, also proved to be influential for the Speed/Thrash metal subgenres in the following decades. Overall, the rest of the band is in full form as well. Rob Halford taking his vocal acrobatics to next level, Glenn and Ken, though continuing their Sabbath/Zeppelin influenced riffage, seems to help the band develop their own sound with their twin axe harmonies.

Opener Sinner, is a great start for the album. Awesome driving riff, wailing vocals by Rob, specially the chorus. "Creature-feature based songwriting" has now become a norm in the Judas Priest department and shall continue to be so. The mid section, though drags a bit long but has a heavy rhythm in it. Diamonds And Rust is a good enough cover, has a catchy drive to it. The opening drum fills in Starbreaker possibly influenced the one in "We're Not Gonna Take It" as it sounds. Has a good breakdown part with a solo on top of it. Possibly, one of the band's most underrated song. Last Rose Of Summer has a cool atmosphere throughout and there's even a brief "Comfortably Numb" moment (before it even came into form) during the solo, which is a nice touch. For me, the highlight of the album is definitely, Let Us Prey/Call For The Priest! One of the best song intros written by the band. The double-bass drumming and the riffing in it surely gives it a proto-Thrash status. Great dual harmonies throughout, as well. Now Raw Deal may have one of Rob's earliest song with suggestive lyrics but I couldn't care any less about its subject matter, considering its already an awesome song, again with a solo having a nice guitar break underneath. Here Come The Tears, being the second ballad in the album, has more dynamics and gives space for Rob's vocals to shine and after after picking its pace midway, has an awesome solo. The closer Dissident Aggressor being another of my favourites, has a swag of its own. An interesting subject matter about the Cold War period Berlin Wall and one's longing to get away with partition. Again, influential for the more extreme sub-genres and there's a reason why Slayer covered it in their 'South Of Heaven' album.

Though the world had evidenced the carnage of Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin etc. and looked upon Blue Oyster Cult as bad boys of rock by the time Sin After Sin was released but Priest's release was for sure a ground-breaking one and highly influential in metal, shaping it further for the time to come.

(for my other album reviews - click here)
 
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I've been going through Priest's discography over the past few weeks and happily Mosh's new album game ties in with this. I'll break down some simple thoughts on each album and then attach the ranking that I will be submitting to him at the end of this post.

Rocka Rolla (1974)
An inauspicious debut, but they had to start somewhere, right? There's not a lot here that's outstanding, but the band does gel together pretty well, able to step into a groove and take it where they like. This is more of a blues rock affair inspired in part by Led Zeppelin than anything else Priest have done. No real standout moments but nothing here that will make you want to turn it off either. An interesting listen but not particularly inspiring. C-

Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)
Massive step up from the debut. It's not perfect, but every song here is good and worth listening to. So many great moments, from the shrieks in "Victim of Changes" to the darkness of "The Ripper" to the proggier "Dreamer Deceiver"/"Deceiver" double-shot - and then a whole second side with more great tracks like the singalong "Tyrant" and the groovy as hell "Genocide". Hard not to name every song here, they're all good. Priest would refine themselves in the future but they proved their songwriting chops all on the second go. A-

Sin After Sin (1977)
Very interesting how the earlier Priest records have more prog influence than their later albums (barring Nostradamus). Sin After Sin kicks off really well with "Sinner" and closes with style in "Dissident Aggressor". In between the band searches to expand their sound as they move from heavy rock to softer ballads. Nothing's bad here, and you can see that they're working to perfect themselves. Future records will be tightened up even further. B

Stained Class (1978)
The framework of heavy metal will be taken from the blueprints laid out on Stained Class. Whether that's in the form of speed metal ("Exciter"), heavy ballad ("Beyond the Realms of Death"), or those dual guitars which have really come into their own, there's a lot you can look back to this record for and point out. Maiden certainly owe it a salute. It isn't perfect, but the good material is really good - and a special shoutout to the cover song "Better by You, Better Than Me" for the controversy being an atmospheric marvel. B+

Killing Machine (1978)
Priest are tightening themselves up and setting themselves on course for an attempt at radio takeover with this one. The great songs here are really great - "Hell Bent for Leather" fucks, "Delivering the Goods" is a great opener, "Green Manalishi" is another great cover - but there is a bit of an identity schism happening during some of the album's runtime, exemplified by the silly "Take On the World", and a lot of the lesser songs just aren't very memorable. It does pave the road forward, though. A lot of the Priest tropes are fully presented in this album. C

British Steel (1980)
As NWOBHM sweeps the UK, Priest come hard with an album full of catchy yet fiery tunes. The band is officially metal, and they're ready to make everyone know it. A couple missteps aside - "Living After Midnight" is only fun when you're twelve; "United" has no soul - the band sounds more alive than they ever have, and songs like "Rapid Fire", "Grinder", "Metal Gods", and of course the utter classic "Breaking the Law" usher in the band into the decade in which the roots spawned by bands like Priest have no fully begun to sprout. Priest themselves are only just beginning their upward arc. B+

Point of Entry (1981)
Of course they had to hit a major funk before they could get rolling, huh? Point of Entry is just commercialism sapped of everything that made Priest good. Even the decent songs like "Heading Out to the Highway" and "Hot Rockin'" just don't hit as hard as the songs on previous albums, and that's not even to mention the utter filler that makes up the majority of this record. The one bright spot here is "Desert Plains" which is fantastic and rivals the best that the band has to offer in general. (And "Solar Angels" ain't bad either.) D+

Screaming for Vengeance (1982)
With the primal screams of multi-tracked guitars, Priest wipe away all traces of their disappointing previous outing - the band has finally found their foothold and they absolutely KILL it with this album. Every song on here is a highlight, every song is filled with energy. The band's sound is fully-formed and even when they drop in a surefire radio anthem ("You've Got Another Thing Comin'") it hits so much harder and with so much more soul than any of the songs where they were painstakingly trying to assemble a hit. This album fucks. A+

Defenders of the Faith (1984)
With plenty of momentum leftover from Screaming for Vengeance, Judas Fucking Priest dial in and deliver the best album of their careers. SfV was just foreshadowing for the grand slam that is Defenders of the Faith. Maybe bands in '84 had a lot of cocaine access given that Maiden released Powerslave in the same year, but holy shit is this band on fire. From the raging opener "Freewheel Burning" to the virtuosic guitar minefield of "Rock Hard Ride Free" to the jaw-droppingly phenomenal story of "The Sentinel", this album is just one banger after another. And the band also allow themselves to experiment, with the dripping '80s sound on "Love Bites" foreshadowing Turbo (but being way better than anything on that album). The closing duo of "Heavy Duty"/"Defenders of the Faith" is definitely the album's weakest point, but they cannot halt the rest of the record from excelling in every possible dimension. S

Turbo (1986)
As interesting as it would have been to get a double album from Priest in '86, one was clearly enough given that Turbo is just such a major letdown from the two albums that came before it. Finally the band was on the right path and taking off like a jet airliner, and suddenly here comes the dangling carrot of radio success to send them careening into the side of a cliff. It's not the production or the synths that hurt this album, it's the fact that the songs are boring as shit. There's good material here - "Turbo Lover" is really cool, "Reckless" whips pretty hard - but so many of these tracks are bottom of the barrel filler and... what else is there to say? D

Ram It Down (1988)
Hard to go much further south than Turbo and thankfully Ram It Down is a pretty solid step up from that mess. It has its own share of flops - "Love Zone", "Come and Get It", "Love You to Death"... who wrote this shit? - but the good songs are actually really good. The title track comes hard and you can easily see the seeds that Painkiller was spawned from. "Blood Red Skies" is obviously the easy highlight here, a monster of a song, but if you look deep enough, there's enough meat on this bones that you can actually enjoy most of this record. Just a shame those three really bad songs have to tank it more than it deserves. C+

Painkiller (1990)
HOLY SHIT. Even if you can hear a heavy form of Priest fighting for dominance in Ram It Down, it's still nearly unbelievable that this band dropped this balls-to-the-wall metal monster just two years after they were flirting with synths and radio singles. Even divorced from Priest this record is ridiculously heavy. The title track is one of the defining songs of the genre's entire history; "Hell Patrol" follows it up like a cannon shrieking in the night. Halford's vocals are obliterating everything in sight. Some tracks don't hit quite as hard, like "All Guns Blazing" (a lesser retread of the title track) and "Metal Meltdown" (not a very good chorus), but these are tiny in comparison to the album's highlights. Side 2 is where the band really lays it all down, trading in the speed for pure heavy darkness and allowing the listener some breathing room as they continue to get pummeled. Just a fantastic album from beginning to end. A+

Jugulator (1997)
And since we can't have nice things, Rob has left the band and they've replaced him with - who gives a shit, it doesn't matter who's singing because the material is SHIT. That's in all caps. There is so little to like about this record it's not even funny. Good ideas are squandered and bad ideas are multiplied. The only thing interesting about "Cathedral Spires" is the chorus. "Jugulator" doesn't know where it's going at all. "Decapitate" is just straight up stupid. "Abductors" came for Priest and left us with this... shit. It's shit. F

Demolition (2001)
I hate Jugulator a lot but I do think its successor, while not perfect, fixes a lot of the issues with it. It's hard to properly rank this album because I don't really view it as a Priest album, but I do like it a lot. The choruses could stand to be catchier but the riff go hard, dropping you into a desert wasteland of sorts with Ripper putting on a really solid performance. You can hear the band's old sound in bits and pieces even as they blend together modern metal elements to create something unique. It doesn't have the brilliance of The Chemical Wedding by any means, but at the same time you can hear some of the same magic in this album. There's not really much else like it. And I like it. A-

Angel of Retribution (2005)
Halford returns and with him comes Roy Z to produce! "Judas Rising" blasts away all issues of the past in one killer album opener. For the rest of the runtime Priest flirt with classic metal rockers ("Deal With the Devil", "Demonizer"), early Priest/Led Zeppelin moments ("Revolution"), two emotive ballads ("Angel", which is awesome, and "Eulogy"), and darkened blazers ("Hellrider"). None of these songs hold a candle to their best material, but they work in their own way (although "Wheels of Fire" is just filler). The album saves its craziest and yet best moment for last, in the monstrously massive "Loch Ness", the band's longest song. It's a theatrical epic that should not work the way it does - but it does, and it really brings up the overall quality of an otherwise mixed comeback record. B-

Nostradamus (2008)
Can't say that Priest didn't try. This album is just way, way too long, and filled with too many interludes and tracks that never knock it out of the ballpark. "New Beginnings" is absolutely one of the worst songs the band has ever written. That being said, there are a lot of good moments if you can sit through the whole thing, although the best song is right at the top of the bill. Leave it to Priest to write a chorus that's just "I AM NOSTRADAMUS" and it not be a flop. The definition of a mixed bag, but they put their heart into it. Or their spleen, IDK. C-/D+

Redeemer of Souls (2014)
KK has gone and the band... just stopped trying? "Halls of Valhalla" is pretty cool, "Secrets of the Dead" is dark and inviting, but almost everything is just... so, so boring. An old band feeling their age slowly catching up to them, unable to turn away from the hands of fate. If they didn't suddenly rediscover their fire after this album, it would almost be tragic. Thank god that this is not where their story ends. D-

Firepower (2018)
This is how you do it. Priest is a band that has always been chasing spectres for a variety of reasons, but when they tighten all the way up and unleash the fire from within they knock it out of the fucking park. Firepower is a fantastic record from these elder statesmen of metal. Faulkner and Tipton have grown as a duo, Rob has shed years off of his voice, and the production duo of Allom/Sneap transforms this outfit into one that can take on and defeat bands lightyears younger than them. Every song is at least good; there are many that go so much higher than that. 18 albums in and somehow they manage to drop one that can happily rival the best of their careers. A

topsters2.jpg
 
Diesel 11 said:
I hate Jugulator a lot but I do think its successor, while not perfect, fixes a lot of the issues with it. It's hard to properly rank this album because I don't really view it as a Priest album, but I do like it a lot. The choruses could stand to be catchier but the riff go hard, dropping you into a desert wasteland of sorts with Ripper putting on a really solid performance. You can hear the band's old sound in bits and pieces even as they blend together modern metal elements to create something unique. It doesn't have the brilliance of The Chemical Wedding by any means, but at the same time you can hear some of the same magic in this album. There's not really much else like it. And I like it. A-
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Someone get me GhostofCain's laughing baby gif.
 
Yeah, strongly disagreed, that's all I can say about that list. At least you managed to not stick Ram It Down at the very bottom.
 
Diesel 11 said:
I've been going through Priest's discography over the past few weeks and happily Mosh's new album game ties in with this. I'll break down some simple thoughts on each album and then attach the ranking that I will be submitting to him at the end of this post.

Rocka Rolla (1974)
An inauspicious debut, but they had to start somewhere, right? There's not a lot here that's outstanding, but the band does gel together pretty well, able to step into a groove and take it where they like. This is more of a blues rock affair inspired in part by Led Zeppelin than anything else Priest have done. No real standout moments but nothing here that will make you want to turn it off either. An interesting listen but not particularly inspiring. C-

Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)
Massive step up from the debut. It's not perfect, but every song here is good and worth listening to. So many great moments, from the shrieks in "Victim of Changes" to the darkness of "The Ripper" to the proggier "Dreamer Deceiver"/"Deceiver" double-shot - and then a whole second side with more great tracks like the singalong "Tyrant" and the groovy as hell "Genocide". Hard not to name every song here, they're all good. Priest would refine themselves in the future but they proved their songwriting chops all on the second go. A-

Sin After Sin (1977)
Very interesting how the earlier Priest records have more prog influence than their later albums (barring Nostradamus). Sin After Sin kicks off really well with "Sinner" and closes with style in "Dissident Aggressor". In between the band searches to expand their sound as they move from heavy rock to softer ballads. Nothing's bad here, and you can see that they're working to perfect themselves. Future records will be tightened up even further. B

Stained Class (1978)
The framework of heavy metal will be taken from the blueprints laid out on Stained Class. Whether that's in the form of speed metal ("Exciter"), heavy ballad ("Beyond the Realms of Death"), or those dual guitars which have really come into their own, there's a lot you can look back to this record for and point out. Maiden certainly owe it a salute. It isn't perfect, but the good material is really good - and a special shoutout to the cover song "Better by You, Better Than Me" for the controversy being an atmospheric marvel. B+

Killing Machine (1978)
Priest are tightening themselves up and setting themselves on course for an attempt at radio takeover with this one. The great songs here are really great - "Hell Bent for Leather" fucks, "Delivering the Goods" is a great opener, "Green Manalishi" is another great cover - but there is a bit of an identity schism happening during some of the album's runtime, exemplified by the silly "Take On the World", and a lot of the lesser songs just aren't very memorable. It does pave the road forward, though. A lot of the Priest tropes are fully presented in this album. C

British Steel (1980)
As NWOBHM sweeps the UK, Priest come hard with an album full of catchy yet fiery tunes. The band is officially metal, and they're ready to make everyone know it. A couple missteps aside - "Living After Midnight" is only fun when you're twelve; "United" has no soul - the band sounds more alive than they ever have, and songs like "Rapid Fire", "Grinder", "Metal Gods", and of course the utter classic "Breaking the Law" usher in the band into the decade in which the roots spawned by bands like Priest have no fully begun to sprout. Priest themselves are only just beginning their upward arc. B+

Point of Entry (1981)
Of course they had to hit a major funk before they could get rolling, huh? Point of Entry is just commercialism sapped of everything that made Priest good. Even the decent songs like "Heading Out to the Highway" and "Hot Rockin'" just don't hit as hard as the songs on previous albums, and that's not even to mention the utter filler that makes up the majority of this record. The one bright spot here is "Desert Plains" which is fantastic and rivals the best that the band has to offer in general. (And "Solar Angels" ain't bad either.) D+

Screaming for Vengeance (1982)
With the primal screams of multi-tracked guitars, Priest wipe away all traces of their disappointing previous outing - the band has finally found their foothold and they absolutely KILL it with this album. Every song on here is a highlight, every song is filled with energy. The band's sound is fully-formed and even when they drop in a surefire radio anthem ("You've Got Another Thing Comin'") it hits so much harder and with so much more soul than any of the songs where they were painstakingly trying to assemble a hit. This album fucks. A+

Defenders of the Faith (1984)
With plenty of momentum leftover from Screaming for Vengeance, Judas Fucking Priest dial in and deliver the best album of their careers. SfV was just foreshadowing for the grand slam that is Defenders of the Faith. Maybe bands in '84 had a lot of cocaine access given that Maiden released Powerslave in the same year, but holy shit is this band on fire. From the raging opener "Freewheel Burning" to the virtuosic guitar minefield of "Rock Hard Ride Free" to the jaw-droppingly phenomenal story of "The Sentinel", this album is just one banger after another. And the band also allow themselves to experiment, with the dripping '80s sound on "Love Bites" foreshadowing Turbo (but being way better than anything on that album). The closing duo of "Heavy Duty"/"Defenders of the Faith" is definitely the album's weakest point, but they cannot halt the rest of the record from excelling in every possible dimension. S

Turbo (1986)
As interesting as it would have been to get a double album from Priest in '86, one was clearly enough given that Turbo is just such a major letdown from the two albums that came before it. Finally the band was on the right path and taking off like a jet airliner, and suddenly here comes the dangling carrot of radio success to send them careening into the side of a cliff. It's not the production or the synths that hurt this album, it's the fact that the songs are boring as shit. There's good material here - "Turbo Lover" is really cool, "Reckless" whips pretty hard - but so many of these tracks are bottom of the barrel filler and... what else is there to say? D

Ram It Down (1988)
Hard to go much further south than Turbo and thankfully Ram It Down is a pretty solid step up from that mess. It has its own share of flops - "Love Zone", "Come and Get It", "Love You to Death"... who wrote this shit? - but the good songs are actually really good. The title track comes hard and you can easily see the seeds that Painkiller was spawned from. "Blood Red Skies" is obviously the easy highlight here, a monster of a song, but if you look deep enough, there's enough meat on this bones that you can actually enjoy most of this record. Just a shame those three really bad songs have to tank it more than it deserves. C+

Painkiller (1990)
HOLY SHIT. Even if you can hear a heavy form of Priest fighting for dominance in Ram It Down, it's still nearly unbelievable that this band dropped this balls-to-the-wall metal monster just two years after they were flirting with synths and radio singles. Even divorced from Priest this record is ridiculously heavy. The title track is one of the defining songs of the genre's entire history; "Hell Patrol" follows it up like a cannon shrieking in the night. Halford's vocals are obliterating everything in sight. Some tracks don't hit quite as hard, like "All Guns Blazing" (a lesser retread of the title track) and "Metal Meltdown" (not a very good chorus), but these are tiny in comparison to the album's highlights. Side 2 is where the band really lays it all down, trading in the speed for pure heavy darkness and allowing the listener some breathing room as they continue to get pummeled. Just a fantastic album from beginning to end. A+

Jugulator (1997)
And since we can't have nice things, Rob has left the band and they've replaced him with - who gives a shit, it doesn't matter who's singing because the material is SHIT. That's in all caps. There is so little to like about this record it's not even funny. Good ideas are squandered and bad ideas are multiplied. The only thing interesting about "Cathedral Spires" is the chorus. "Jugulator" doesn't know where it's going at all. "Decapitate" is just straight up stupid. "Abductors" came for Priest and left us with this... shit. It's shit. F

Demolition (2001)
I hate Jugulator a lot but I do think its successor, while not perfect, fixes a lot of the issues with it. It's hard to properly rank this album because I don't really view it as a Priest album, but I do like it a lot. The choruses could stand to be catchier but the riff go hard, dropping you into a desert wasteland of sorts with Ripper putting on a really solid performance. You can hear the band's old sound in bits and pieces even as they blend together modern metal elements to create something unique. It doesn't have the brilliance of The Chemical Wedding by any means, but at the same time you can hear some of the same magic in this album. There's not really much else like it. And I like it. A-

Angel of Retribution (2005)
Halford returns and with him comes Roy Z to produce! "Judas Rising" blasts away all issues of the past in one killer album opener. For the rest of the runtime Priest flirt with classic metal rockers ("Deal With the Devil", "Demonizer"), early Priest/Led Zeppelin moments ("Revolution"), two emotive ballads ("Angel", which is awesome, and "Eulogy"), and darkened blazers ("Hellrider"). None of these songs hold a candle to their best material, but they work in their own way (although "Wheels of Fire" is just filler). The album saves its craziest and yet best moment for last, in the monstrously massive "Loch Ness", the band's longest song. It's a theatrical epic that should not work the way it does - but it does, and it really brings up the overall quality of an otherwise mixed comeback record. B-

Nostradamus (2008)
Can't say that Priest didn't try. This album is just way, way too long, and filled with too many interludes and tracks that never knock it out of the ballpark. "New Beginnings" is absolutely one of the worst songs the band has ever written. That being said, there are a lot of good moments if you can sit through the whole thing, although the best song is right at the top of the bill. Leave it to Priest to write a chorus that's just "I AM NOSTRADAMUS" and it not be a flop. The definition of a mixed bag, but they put their heart into it. Or their spleen, IDK. C-/D+

Redeemer of Souls (2014)
KK has gone and the band... just stopped trying? "Halls of Valhalla" is pretty cool, "Secrets of the Dead" is dark and inviting, but almost everything is just... so, so boring. An old band feeling their age slowly catching up to them, unable to turn away from the hands of fate. If they didn't suddenly rediscover their fire after this album, it would almost be tragic. Thank god that this is not where their story ends. D-

Firepower (2018)
This is how you do it. Priest is a band that has always been chasing spectres for a variety of reasons, but when they tighten all the way up and unleash the fire from within they knock it out of the fucking park. Firepower is a fantastic record from these elder statesmen of metal. Faulkner and Tipton have grown as a duo, Rob has shed years off of his voice, and the production duo of Allom/Sneap transforms this outfit into one that can take on and defeat bands lightyears younger than them. Every song is at least good; there are many that go so much higher than that. 18 albums in and somehow they manage to drop one that can happily rival the best of their careers. A

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Having Stained Class and Sin after Sin out of the top 6 is blasphemy!
 
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