"Painkiller" is the Best Judas Priest Album

A while ago I was listening to a couple of old windbags hack their way through the Judas Priest catalog. After loving homages to Ram It Down and Turbo, they made it to 1990's Painkiller. They probably spent about 45 seconds going through the tracklisting and saying, "I don't remember any of these songs. I don't remember listening to it. It probably sucks. Next." Oh no they didn't.

My theory is that if you don't get Painkiller, you don't get Judas Priest. It's everything the band embodies taken to the absolute extreme - do you want to see the band jog some leisurely laps or break the damn sound barrier? There's no half-assery going on with this baby, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the best record the band ever made.

Painkiller can most obviously be seen as a reaction from the old guard to the thrash movement. The Clash of the Titans tour was going at full force, and speed was king with bands like Anthrax, Slayer and Metallica (the Black Album wouldn't be out for another year) shredding metal into submission. Judas Priest heard this stuff and said, "OK, you kids think you're hot shit? Step aside for dad to show you how it's done."

The title track is the most blatant crusher, opening with a drum solo and with at least four hyper-shred guitar solos that make bands like DragonForce weep in their tasteless shame. Halford cranks the fantasy apocalyptic imagery up to 10 and screams his head off more than he ever had before, something you wouldn't expect 16 years after the band's first album. That would be like Metallica releasing their heaviest album in 1999 - and instead, they made an album with a damn orchestra. Anyhow, most Priest fans are already familiar with the title track, since it's a live staple (and Death's Death's worshipful cover of it eight years later brought extreme metal fans back to check it out). I want to take a look at some of the deeper cuts, since this thing is a brilliant slab of metal across the board and deserves to be treated as such.

"Hell Patrol"

This is my favorite song on the album and features what I consider the best Rob Halford vocal ever. Much like the title track, it's immediate how much the switch in drummers to Scott Travis has changed the band. It's like he rolled into practice one day with a double-kick pedal and said, "Hey dudes, look what I found. Let's use this as much as we can." Hit 2:47 for the ultimate in Halford brilliance - bummer how he takes it down an octave now in the live shows. The band actually dragged this song out on its first post-Nostradamus tour, which excited me a great deal. I wish they'd dusted off this next bad boy, too.

"Night Crawler"

First of all, any metal song that opens with thunder has to be good, right? "Black Sabbath," "Raining Blood," etc. Thunder means glory is imminent. This track has another top notch Halford vocal, which is really one of the most consistent things about the album. It makes me wonder if he knew this would be his last album with the band and so he just went all out for it, or if maybe the album was so damn heavy that he knew he wouldn't be able to top it until he was like 60 and wouldn't be expected to be that brutal anymore. I'm a big fan of the riff in the chorus, which brings back riffing along the lines of "Electric Eye," and the bridge at 2:36 is quite great.

"Metal Meltdown"

Just imagine these dudes trying to play that intro now. That's shredding beyond shredding, kids. This song has a particularly terrible set of lyrics, but if you're paying attention to those, you're missing the point. Every word to this song could just be "metal" and it would have the same effect. There's another clutch Scott Travis drum performance on here, and the guitars are really taken to the edge of taste. Isn't that the whole point, though? Do we really want a mid-tempo groove here? Screw that. This song is called "Metal Meltdown" for a reason.

As I said before, I'm of the mind that if you don't get this album, you don't really get Judas Priest. Everything that's great about the band - the grandiosity, the twin guitar attack, Halford's wail - is here at its most powerful. There's no point in having the guys retard their abilities, and on Painkiller, they were taking them as far as they could go at the time. It doesn't have to be tasteful - it's metal.