Album review: Judas Priest “Nostradamus”

by Keith in Uncategorized

So what shows up in the mail the other day but my pre-ordered copy of ‘Nostradamus’ by Judas Priest, ordered for one reason and one reason only – along with it came the chance to attend a Judas Priest in-store signing. Which was a great idea, except the Jersey Turnpike had other plans (which you can read about in a previous blog here).  So with no autograph to show from the signing and the only other release from the last 10 years the subpar “Angel of Retribution”, I was thinking this album better be good‘.  And damn… it IS. Judas Priest is pulling a Bernard Hopkins on us.

For those of you not familiar with Bernard Hopkins, he’s a Philly-raised fighter who has fought a LONG time. As he neared what everyone thought was the end of his career he lost twice to Jermain Taylor, who is one hell of a fighter – but in general it was agreed that Hopkins (40 at the time) had finally had age catch up with him.

Then, he came back.

He beat two great fighters (Antonio Tarver and Winky Wright) in 2006 and 2007, and fought so well in those bouts that in a way it almost HURT him.  The logic before those fights was ‘Hopkins is getting old’, but then a year or two later he was great, leading people to ask the question “what the hell happened with those Jermain Taylor fights?” And that’s kind of what’s going on here – this new Priest album is SO good, it calls into question their less-than-great recent albums. If you can make a record this good now, how did the albums before this happen?

But you know what? That’s nitpicking. This is a great Judas Priest record, and that’s the important part.  The thing that Judas Priest has always been, in my opinion, is a band that doesn’t give you the low lows, but also doesn’t deliver the highest highs in terms of songs that immediately spring to mind as classics.  As an analogy, compare them to two other metal titans: Kiss and Black Sabbath.  If most metal fans were to list every song by all three bands in order of how much they liked them, Kiss and Sabbath would occupy the very top of the list (with world-destroyers like “War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, “She”, “God of Thunder” and the like) but would also hold down the absolute bottom with some entire albums of theirs (for Kiss, “Hot in the Shade” and “Crazy Nights” – for Sabbath, “ Seventh Star”).  Priest, even with their album with lead singer Ripper Owens, doesn’t occupy any of the bottom spots. What you get from The Priest is consistency – they just don’t write a lot of bad songs.

It’s always cool to hear a band that’s been around for a long time absorb the influence of new bands and incorporate it into their own thing. That becomes evident from the beginning of this record, a concept album that from the opening intro invokes images of King Diamond (good King Diamond, like “Abigail” King Diamond, his finest concept album.  Not “Them” or “Conspiracy”, albums that were decent in their own right but super-weak as concept albums) and believe it or not, shades of Between the Buried and Me (a current death metal/progressive band who released one of the craziest, illest, most adventurous metal records in a long time recently, “Colors”).  You get the feeling the Mighty Priest was sitting around listening to some of this stuff saying “WE can do this”. And the end result is great – all at once fresh, exciting and familiar.

A few more things about the record: back in the day, Judas Priest actually TRIED to sell out, to the point where they said stuff to that extent in interviews.  They talked about how a lot of their albums went gold, but by the time they got to “Turbo” and “Ram It Down”, they purposely tried to make radio-friendly, catchy stuff that would allow them sales in the multiple millions (their logic was if these up-and-comers can make inferior albums and sell 5+ million records, why can’t they? I always got the feeling they were staring in Quiet Riot’s general direction when they said that). Even ‘returning to their roots’ albums like “Painkiller” and “Angel of Retribution” had tinges of the era when they desired to become radio-friendly.  But this record? Despite its nice production, it’s much more reminiscent of the REALLY old school Judas Priest, like “Rocka Rolla” or “Sad Wings of Destiny” – more epic in its content and more concerned with being an album than a collection of singles.

And the production! This is one of the few albums in existence that actually sound great on every stereo I’ve played it on so far, the toughest test being the piece-of-crap factory direct stereo in my 2005 Honda.  For something to sound good in my car is pretty amazing, it makes me wonder if the Mighty Priest brought a 2005 Honda into the studio, all got in and said to themselves “we know it sounds good on the four thousand dollar studio monitors, but does it sound good in this Honda?” And damn, it does.

So there you have it, a great new record from Judas Priest. If you’re not a fan of music like this, you probably won’t like it, but for you metalheads it’s definitely worth a listen – and for Priest fans it’s damn near essential.

Two devilhorns up!