Best Judas Priest Album

I am now going to finally listen to Ram It Down cos why the fuck not, it's about time

I still love the title track and "Blood Red Skies", Johnny B Goode is awful. everything else, I haven't heard!

"Heavy Metal" - the fuck is this pseudo-Def Leppard shit

"Love Zone" - this was p much written for strip clubs wasn't it

"Come and Get It" - this at least SOUNDS like Priest, at least until the bridge when it goes to hair metal town. and these lyrics, fuuuuck

"Hard as Iron" - jesus christ

"Blood Red Skies" - always loved this one, a fav. shame about the album it's on

"I'm a Rocker" - this song is wearing zebra pants with a shit-stain on the back

"Johnny B Goode" - god, what they did to the chorus is just criminal

"Love You to Death" - this could p much be a late 80s Motley song

"Monsters of Rock" - this is fucking 'Stonehenge'

Not too keen on Angel Of Retribution but "Hellrider" is really fun and "Loch Ness" is the most nwobhm thing, I'm impressed how straight faced it is, it's pretty cool.

we should really repoll this

results more baffling every time

I like metal but never liked a single thing by Judas Priest

True true trollish response would be 'I like metal hence I never liked a single thing by Judas Priest'.

started reading Confess.

in the foreword, he uses his favorite recent phrase: "I am the stately homo of heavy metal".

the story of how he first sang in class and his teacher took him to several other classrooms to have him sing was pretty awesome. can't wait to finish this.

Martin Popoff's book on Judas Priest is quite good.

I would have voted Stained Class. Rocka Rolla is not an embarrassment but none of it works either, partly due to a completely leaden drummer, who then has to try to start a groove in 5/4 time in the opening track.

Confess is really good.

Huh...I wouldn’t be thrown if someone told me Sad Wings was there favorite because it’s pretty interesting and transitional but still..

Not exactly an uncommon opinion

I never got the detraction from Painkiller being too much pandering to more 'extreme' metal like thrash, et al. the album is earwormy as fuck. like, it's more 'extreme' Priest, but the vocal and guitar melodies are all over the place awesome.

little 18 year old me probably gravitated to it for that reason. it melts faces, but it still has their songcraft at the center.

When Pantera supported Priest it seemed to be a revelation for Priest... I still remember the pix from that tour.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/46440539_1858849597540264_7416699773278748672_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-5&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=EC6Wt1v-s8kAX_nEJyf&tn=0A0EJtp07Dhgs60j&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=9fdc3f5da608ea411b86587e3fdf94c8&oe=615E445F

The album was definitely a case where Priest saw the future and wanted to be a part of it.

I'm so old, I can remember when Phil Anselmo had an upper register.

probably the only vocalist in history that degraded not because he smoked, stopped practicing, got old, but because he felt his old singing style was "too wussy" and deliberately never went back to it and proceeded to destroy any ability to sing like that anymore, probably intentionally

ffs the high notes in Cemetary Gates are insane.

for whatever reason I spent half the post above mis-remembering Phil Anselmo being dead and remembered he's not.

oh well

I always liked Painkiller

Painkiller has aged beautifully over the last 30 years.

speaking of, I caught a vid from the Bloodstock set, and they did "Hell Patrol". the only previous time they played it, he took the chorus down an octave.

not this time.

and he hit the high notes during the bridge too.

idk what he did but his voice sounds way better than in, like, 2009.

was he a smoker?

feel like I should know that after I read Confess....ugh.

I know he abstains from drinking after some crazy living in the 80s. can't recall on the cigs.

Painkiller is such a great album. I was positively obsessed with it for a while earlier this year. Endless riffs and hooks

xpost yeah just thinking of one of the only ways that an older person's singing voice might improve over time

one day I went to karaoke at a local haunt. this place used to be great, but new Trump/gun-loving owners came in, and fired my friend the KJ who had worked there for like 20+ years. so needless to say I didn't wanna go back, but I got invited by two friends one night and I said 'hey why not'.

so I look through the songs and I am surprised to see "Nightcrawler" by Judas Priest, from Painkiller, on the karaoke list. so I put in to sing it.

this is a very countrified audience and I get up already thinking they'll hate me, but maybe if I do my best Halford, I'll win them over. then the karaoke track starts and I find out it's a fucking MIDI file. the guitars sound like farts.

I suddenly felt like I was singing over Nintendo music, sweat profusely the entire time, and sang like garbage cos I wanted it to be over.

I blame Painkiller for this.

xpost yeah that would make sense. i'll have to look it up.

I have a theory that he might have gone to a vocal coach/lessons to teach him new ways to produce the same sounds. because it does seem like he's altered his technique a little bit on the falsetto to make it work without sounding like he swallowed barbed wire.

I'd like to hear a MIDI version of "Nightcrawler". However, I would not like to sing over one in public

sounded like it was made in 1995

That's how I'm imagining it, like something from the original Doom soundtrack

i feel like the general consensus about "turbo" being a really fun, engaging oddity in their catalog has risen over the years which makes me happy

also watched the US festival doc again the other day and goddamn do they completely destroy on metal day

crue seems so fucking feeble compared to priest, scorpions, and (believe it or not) triumph, motley is some real non-playing motherfuckers to quote miles davis

motley have always stunk live
100% non playing motherfuckers

love the Scorps. would love to see them one day. more of an Uli Jon Roth era fan but I like the stadium stuff too.

Turbo definitely has grown in stature in retrospect. I can understand why.

Priest's trajectory in the 80s was a little odd - British Steel and Point of Entry was clearly their attempt to go a more commercial direction, but then they started bending back towards balls to the wall metal. Screaming for Vengeance was kind of a mixture of commercial and tr00 metal, somewhat jarring how they go from like the title track to "Fever", or "Riding on the Wind" to "Take These Chains". and then Defenders of the Faith pretty much went all the way back to face-melting metal. even the Ray Haligan, Jr penned-song ("Some Heads are Gonna Roll") sounded like a Priest classic. so I think fans thought they would continue in that direction, and they incorporated synths and poppier elements, unlike their previous commercial efforts. Guessing fans were just confused, thinking they'd continue in the Defenders direction.

removing expectations from the mix helps. the title track has always been glorious, one of the best examples of synth-80s metal done well. "Out in the Cold" is great, and I enjoy the cheese of "Rock You All Around the World". I hate "Wild Nights and Crazy Days" and "Parental Guidance". but Priest taking this turn in 86 wasn't, like, a Cold Lake type move. they'd already made similar pivots before, they just happened to have arguably their best, most uptempo album sandwiched in between those maneuvers.

Ram It Down, on the other hand, is completely irredeemable. other than the title track and Blood Red Skies, I guess.

listening to Point of Entry rn, I really love this

i never really understand the metal audience but my feeling is that is there really any harm in some curveballs? like looking through their catalog is there shortage of judas priest true metal songs?

a little disappointed that "thunder road" isn't a springsteen cover, given that they've covered joan baez it didn't seem impossible

no harm in curveballs. but metal has a sizable population of meatheads who don't think the formula should change. the first (and only) time I saw Savatage live, there was a 40-something guy who kept saying "fuck this, play Sirens" for about an hour, until they finally did. everybody was telling him to shut the fuck up.

hell, right now, there are metalheads (not on ILX) shitting on the new Maiden because it's long and ponderous and doesn't sound like "The Trooper". (there are others who have more legit, reasoned criticisms, but there's a whole lot of the former too).

quite frankly, I'm disappointed we never got an album like their cover of "You are Everything", of which only 60 seconds has been made publicly available. the sample of that cover is one of the most amazing things I've ever heard, like they metalized the song without losing its pop foundation and it's gorgeous. and Halford himself says he's a 'pop tart' in Confess, so I suspect he'd love to record an album of pop and R&B covers.

I...don't hate Ram It Down. It's about half a good album; the title track, "Heavy Metal," "Come and Get It," "Hard as Iron" ...all decent songs. And the ugliness of the production (the guitars especially) works for me in the same way AC/DC's Fly On The Wall does. It's just a really ear-punishing album, but it's got more songs I actually like than Turbo. And you can absolutely hear that they were two halves of the same coin; there are synths and drum machines all over Ram It Down.

i'm a fellow fly on the wall apologist