Last night we had some serious wind, causing a nearby power line to arc and our power to flicker in and out about six times in the middle of the night. That kept me wide awake for most of the early morning hours, so I was glad to dial up some Judas Priest for the ride into work.
If any band has reason to fear they were being lampooned by Spinal Tap, it is probably Judas Priest, with its extensive history, numerous drummers and leathery image. Their first few albums are surprising to listen to mainly because the motifs of riding motorcycles on stage and wearing lots of leather didn't gel until the end of the 1970's. Although Sad Wings of Destiny from 1976 is now seen as a landmark of early metal, back then it was a largely ignored album by a band with a strange sound. Who said it was easy being ahead of your time? With each passing album, Priest honed and tightened their sound, making less adventurous but more focused albums, achieving their 1980's trademark sound somewhere between 1978's Killing Machine (Hell Bent for Leather in the USA) and 1980's British Steel, marking the early boundary of the scope of this particular disc. Unlike Dio (see Sacred Heart) the band lineup was stable and the actually continued to improve their sound and popularity from one album to the next, reaching their zenith by the middle of the decade. After a little heart flutter in 1984, the year of Defenders of the Faith, the band launched in a questionable new direction with the synthetic Turbo, followed by the faux-retro Ram It Down. By decade's end they were in a pretty bad place. Longtime drummer Dave Holland (always a strange fit for the band) threw in the towel and the were carrying the image of being has-beens. Amazingly, Painkiller (1990), the last album featured in this collection, was a speed-metal reinvention of the band that actually succeeded, but the success was fleeting and singer Rob Halford exited to experiment with new short-lived outfits like Fight and Two and his very own impressive solo band. Meanwhile Priest would release two true horrific albums in the late 1990's before a successful reunion finally happened in the following decade, one that has stuck to this day with minimal drama.
It made sense to grab this "greatest hits" package because at the time I had nothing by Judas Priest and it was a free promo copy given to the radio station. Since then I've mostly focused on the early stuff, though I did have a moment of weakness and bought Angel of Retribution back in the day. It hits all the key songs from 1978 to 1990, which is good, but I have some issues with the sequencing of the tracks. I don't see why they couldn't just have used a straight chronological approach. It almost feels like somebody stacked the tapes in the chronological order, then accidentally dropped them and put them back in a slightly wrong order. For example, "Turbo Lover" comes before the Defenders of the Faith tracks, and "Metal Meltdown" before "Ram It Down" which causes the listener to lose all track of the band's sound progression from NWOBHM to speed metal. Also there is a ten-year step back in the time for the last three tracks from the not-exactly-live Unleashed in the East featuring songs from their second and third albums, which fall outside the scope of the rest of the album. They could have goosed up the last few 1980's albums instead. All of this aside, if you are a Priest novice like I once was, this is a good collection to pick up.
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