Listening Post: Judas Priest - Jugulator

Oh. No. Nonononono.




Judas Priest - Jugulator - 1997 (Not Available)

What the fuck were they thinking?

Okay. Let's get this out of the way. This is the record with "Ripper" Owens, you know, the guy that the movie Rock Star was ("NOT") based on? Halford is gone. And somehow he took all songwriting abilities with him.

There are no songs here. There are just a series of aggro-neu-metal riffing and slamming with an angry, screaming guy declaring that you are meat, or something.

This non stop attempt to be current fails on so many levels that its sad. Painful. Owens sounds like he's been directed to sound as much like Halford meets Hetfield as possible and sing some of the stupidest lyrics ever committed to plastic.

This is a terrible record. Not available on itunes OR Amazon. Even the import link is Out of Stock.

Consider yourself lucky.

Grade F
A Side:-----
BlindSide:
DownSide: Everything. This is a mess.

Listening Post: Judas Priest - Painkiller

Waitaminnit.



Judas Priest - Painkiller - 1990 (iTunes - Amazon)

I don't know what happened. I don't know how it came to be. I imagine that the new drummer, Scott Travis unleashed something but...

This album is great.
I mean it's scary great.
Halford is in full voice and the Tipton/Downing double guitar attack is augmented by the speed drumming of Travis.
Don't think hair metal. Think Ride the Lightning. Think Megadeth. Then watch these old hands leapfrog right over all that to create this masterpiece of metal.
This is more than just a headbanging collection of songs. This is a band that has set out to reinvent themselves AS themselves. They sweep aside just about every pretender to their thrown and prove themselves as relevant as Metallica in 1990.

There is a great trilogy of Priest records now. Hell Bent For Leather - Screaming for Vengeance - Painkiller.

It's that simple.

Grade A
A Side: Between the Hammer and the Anvil, Painkiller, Metal Meltdown.
BlindSide: Everything else.
DownSide: ------

Reflecting Pool: Green Day - Shenanigans

Hey! It's Green Day's B-Sides! I don't know why that excited me so much.



Green Day - Shenanigans - 2002 (iTunes - Amazon)

Let's just go through this track by track, shall we?

1. Suffocate. B-Side for Good Riddance
Classic Dookie type GD. (A)
2. Desensitized. B-Side for Good Riddance
Well, the beating at the beginning should scare the shit out of you. And the song, another pop/punk classic delivers. (B+)
3. You Lied. B-Side for Good Riddance
Lazier than the others. The first track that really doesn't belong on an album. (C)
4. Outsider B-Side for Warning
I wish this had just a little more teeth. Armstrong's vocals are more Joey Ramone than ever. It's really a Ramones tune at heart. (B)
5. Don't Wanna Fall In Love - B-Side for Geek Stink Breath
Terrific punk skiffle. (A)
6. Espionage - B-Side for Hitchin' A Ride
Green Day's take on The Peter Gunn Theme. Instrumental 60s era surf-rock, TV Spy theme. (B+)
7. I Want to Be On TV - B-Side for Geek Stink Breath
Black Flag would be proud. Cover of a Fang tune (A)
8. Scumbag - B-Side for Warning
A rare Mike Dirnt track. Good enough to be included on the first three records. Wouldn't really have fit on Warning. (B+)
9. Tired of Waiting for You - B-Side of Basket Case
The Kinks' Classic! This proves where GD's roots really were. 60s Pop. Much to their chagrin, I'm sure. (A)
10. Sick of Me - B-Side for Hitchin' a Ride
Like it fell off Insomniac. In a lot of ways a rewrite of Walking Contradiction. (B)
11. Rotting - B-Side for Good Riddance
Surf Punk that calls to mind, believe it or not, The Beach Boys. To me, at least. (B+)
12. Do Da Da - B-Side for Brain Stew
That Classic GD Sound. I would have played this track more than the A Side. It's more fun to Air Guitar while driving. (A)
13. On the Wagon - B-Side for Basket Case
Terrific Cow-punk. If Hank Williams was a GenX punk, he would've written this. Or covered it. (B+)
14. Ha Ha You're Dead - Previously Unreleased
Another Mike Dirnt Track! Tight, Taut, simple punk. (A)

All in All. A blast. Do you need Shenanigans? Probably not. But the band would never really sound like this again.

Grade B+
A Side: (Of a bunch of B-sides) Ha Ha You're Dead, Suffocate
BlindSide: Desensitized, Espionage
DownSide: You Lied

Listening Post: Judas Priest - Ram It Down

It's 1988. Metal is everywhere. And the fathers of the movement are rendering themselves anonymous in their quest for domination and relevance.



Judas Priest - Ram It Down - 1986 (iTunes - Amazon)


Now, I'm just confused.
Ram It Down is supposed to be the second half of Turbo. Everything I've read says that they were trying to release Turbo as a double album.
But Turbo sucks. It's interminable.
Ram It Down at least sounds like Priest. 80s Priest. By which I mean generic Priest. But, it's light years better than the synthesizer horror show that was Turbo.
Proof that Priest has run out of ideas? There is a track called "Heavy Metal". Need I say more? This would be like The Cars writing a song called, "New Wave." Or Boston recording a tune called "Classic Rock!"
Or...
You get the idea.
The first half of the album isn't horrible. It doesn't aspire to be anything more than an arena filling, banger-satisfying, play-it-LOUD album. And in that respect it succeeds.
The second half starts off with the epic Blood Red Skies. Harmless and not very inventive, it's classic mid-80s Priest. I could see myself blasting this on an open desert road. On my way to kill someone's grandmother. Or dog. And I mean that in a good way.
However.
Don't. Under ANY circumstances. Listen to their cover of Johnny B. Good. If you do then you're on your own. I can't help you. You've been warned.
While the name "Ram it Down" makes sense, I can't help but wonder if they wanted to name it after the sludge metal closing track, "Monsters of Rock". I have a soft spot in my heart for a band that writes a song with no irony. Especially a song that has already been rendered a parody of itself by Spinal Tap.

Ram It Down is not nearly as bad as you've heard. When it's good (Blood Red Skies, Hard as Iron, Ram It Down) it's really good. When it's not it's mediocre. It's not Turbo. Thank god.

Grade C
A Side: Ram It Down, Hard as Iron, Blood Red Skies
BlindSide: Love Zone,
DownSide: Heavy Metal, Johnny B. Goode.

Listening Post: Judas Priest - Turbo

Uh-oh.



Judas Priest - Turbo - 1986 (iTunes -Amazon)



Turbo Lover? Oh, dear.
Someone has run almost completely out of ideas or hung out with Freddie Mercury far too often.
Synthesizers? Who is this? Night Ranger? Loverboy?
It must have really sucked to be a Judas Priest fan in 1986. Can you imagine trying to defend this crap? While your younger brother or sister is cranking Poison's Look What the Cat Dragged In you can't say anything because their songs are more fun than anything on this dreadful outing.
And now you're "Locked In" and, well, let's let Priest explain:

I can't stand the way you move it
You drive me crazy with that walk
You get me so excited
I tremble and I shake
When you make the moves you make

This band wrote Screaming for Vengeance? Electric Eye? Killing Machine?

Like I said, Oh, dear.

What should have been a screed against the PMRC, "Parental Guidance" ends up sounding like EVERY. OTHER. GLAM. METAL. BAND. It could have been recorded by Bulletboys, for god's sake.

This is just terrible. And sad.

Grade F
A Side: I will not list Turbo Lover here. I don't care that it was the single.
BlindSide: Rock You All Around the World
DownSide: Private Property, Hot for Love.

Reflecting Pool: Green Day - Warning

Consider this a different kind of Listening Post and more like a Reflections Column. With Reflecting Pool I will be going back through the catalog of bands that I love and have been following for years. I will try to be as impartial as possible, but I admit that I am biased. This is a little more loosey than the LPs.

"Everybody loves a joke, but no one likes a fool."



Green Day - Warning - 2000 (iTunes - Amazon)



Opening with the acoustic, unplugged anthem, "Warning", this album sorts of suggests either a band at a crossroads or stifled by their roots.
Then, what's this? Another mid-tempo, melodic, bass driven, hook laden song! "Blood, Sex & Booze" is the thematic cousing to Dookie's "Pulling Teeth". A theme I'm all too familiar with. Only this time the narrator's not afraid of his captor. No, he longs for the punishment. It fulfills him.
Then we're on to Church on Sunday. A ramp up, rave up relationship song of compromise. And it's excellent.
I'm going with stifled by their roots. There's only so much power/punk one can do. If you have the songwriting chops the songs can fit in any idiom. Hell, they could be country, disco or coffee shop singer songwriter, right?
So why not stretch the boundaries? There's still enough bombast, as in the forementioned, "Church".
In the past, a great band would switch things up. The Beatles just wrote good songs. Queen played everything from Gospel to punk to disco. You have to. To keep things fresh.
This is what Green Day does here. Their punk roots have turned their back on them. I think by this time they had been banned from the very club they started in, right? While Bille Joe has railed against the hippies of the 60's and the boomer generation he is, at the same time, a victim of his own roots. All sorts of styles bubble through these songs and, while they are not "punk" they still all sound like Green Day.
Only this sort of confidence and punk "no fear" aesthetic could allow them to put out the brilliant "Misery", which owes more than just a passing glance to Kurt Weill and might well be one of the best songs the band has ever recorded. By virtue of it's "Fuck you, we're doing the oompas, anyway! You don''t like it? Here's a mariachi band, too!"
Then, just when you wonder what the hell you are listening to..."Deadbeat Holiday". Classic Green Day.
They wear their influences on their sleeves, too. Who can't hear "Stand by Me" in "Macy's Day Parade"? Or Petula Clark's "Downtown" in "Waiting"?
Billie Joe is wresting those great songwriters of the past and jamming them through his own taffy machine and coming up with fresh takes and new ideas.

I don't like to quote other reviewers but I will for this recap. AllMusic's Stephen Erlewine gets it right when he says:

Warning may not be an innovative record per se, but it's tremendously satisfying; it finds the band at a peak of songcraft and performance, doing it all without a trace of self-consciousness. It's the first great pure pop album of the new millennium.

Amen.

Is it better than Dookie? It's not the same. Not by a long shot. This is a different band even though the players are the same. Warning makes me happy and giddy with every song. It's the kind of album you love to rediscover.

Grade A
A Side: Misery, Waiting, Macy's Day Parade, Minority (In it's heart it's just an Irish shanty jig, right?)
BlindSide: Fashion Victim, Jackass,
DownSide: Hold On

Listening Post: Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith

And the metal Gods roll along.....



Judas Priest - Defenders of the Faith - 1984 (iTunes - Amazon)

I really feel like I should put about as much effort into this review as the band did into this record.

Mediocre.

There.

Okay, I'll put in a little more, after all, they showed up to the studio, right?

Talk about finding your formula and mining it for whatever it's worth. There is no ambition on this album. It's a bunch of musicians who know their job, know what they are supposed to do, do it with very little imagination and that's pretty much it.
Unlike it's predecessors, Screaming for Vengeance & Hell Bent for Leather, on this album Halford & Co. know that they are shamans, pied piers to the headbanging unwashed and they also know that those that make up their base will buy what they have, show up at concerts, get drunk in the parking lot, air guitar their asses off and blow the band.
Not a bad way to make a living and at the time, were I Priest fan I would have eaten it up. But it's 22 years later and my job here is to determine the value of this stuff for me, for you, for the world.
You don't need to hear this album.
You've heard it.
This sound, the Ratt/Def Leppard/Whitesnake/ad nauseam super big kick drum, extra echo sound, is, well, not dated as much as it's boring. I think it was kind of boring in 84, but now? I don't care.
This is by the numbers Priest.

It should be noted that the Nerf Herder tune, "Defending the Faith" which is ABOUT headbanging mullethead guitar hero rock star wannabes, is better than any track in this collection.

Grade C
A Side: nothing I can really recommend. Maybe Freewheel Burning
BlindSide: Rock Hard Ride Free,
DownSide: Eat Me Alive, Some Heads are Gonna Roll, Night Comes Down

Reflecting Pool: Green Day - Nimrod

Consider this a different kind of Listening Post and more like a Reflections Column. With Reflecting Pool I will be going back through the catalog of bands that I love and have been following for years. I will try to be as impartial as possible, but I admit that I am biased. This is a little more loosey than the LPs.




Green Day - Nimrod - 1997 (iTunes - Amazon

I've never heard this album. Something must have happened between Insomniac and....wait a minnit! Yep. I had a lot of....personal shit going on. Divorce, sick kid, custody....hmm. In fact, upon reflection, I didn't even get Insomniac until around the time that this came out. So I was pretty behind in my Green Day.
And then I heard so many bad things about this record that I just eschewed it completely.
I don't really think I was missing anything.
It's not bad, per se. Billie Joe Armstrong is such a good pop/rock song writer that it's a fait accompli that the album will be listenable. And it is. It's still aggro-punk in places. But, right at the middle of the album, there is this instrumental track, Last Ride In, which many punks may have taken for a little bit o' irony. It's a surf tune in the Ventures vein. But i think it's more of a harbinger of things to come.
This is the longest GD record so far and it's packed with the familiar strains, the great chord progressions, the catchy as hell choruses, the fury and speed. 18 songs and only two clock in at over 3 1/2 minutes. The aforementioned instru-ventures track and the ballad that would cement the rejection of the punk world that turned it's back on the band after they went multi-plat with Dookie and give them their biggest single crossover hit; Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). A song lucky enough to carry on the grand tradition of angry songs mistaken for having uplifting messages. One by U2, Born in the USA, By Springsteen are examples.
Songs like Platypus and Take it Back are SO punk that I am surprised that that community turned their backs on Green Day as traitors to the cause so vehemently. Their loss. But these songs, while harkening back to GD's roots, are bad.
I do love that Reject was written as a response to an exchange that Armstrong had with the mother of a kid who was a fan. (From Wikipedia: "Reject" came from an incident where a boy received Green Day's previous album, Insomniac for his eighth birthday from his grandma. The boy started singing Green Day's songs (with explicit lyrics), and his mother got angry and wrote a complaint letter to Armstrong; Armstrong wrote an actual letter back to her, and this song was based on his response.
At the time this came out, I would have been bored with Dookie and Insomniac and I would have welcomed more songs by the band. This is a good pace holder. But you don't need anything but the singles. Well, King for a Day is fun.

Grade C+
A Side: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), Hitchin' A Ride, Nice Guys Finish Last
BlindSide: Jinx, Haushinka, King for a Day
Downside: (I'm gonna catch hell for this but....) Platypus & Worry Rock.

Listening Post: Judas Priest - Screaming for Vengeance

Priest ushers in the true age of metal. And millions of cans of final net will be sold before the decade is out.



Judas Priest - Screaming for Vengeance - 1982 (iTunes - Amazon)

I would like to go back in time 25 years and kick the pretentious asshole that is my younger, teenage self, in the ass.
Why, you ask?
Because, the only reason, or the main reason that I poopoo-ed this album is because the title of the song, "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" is an eggcorn. Oh, there wasn't a name for it. I only recently learned what it is, but it's right and it fits.
it's "You've got another THINK coming!" And that would also, lyrically, follow the logic of the song.
Oh, feh.
By being such a grammar priss I missed out on the most essential metal album of the 80s. Everything that came before was prelude to "Vengeance". All bands that came later were but pretenders to the throne or worshipped at this altar.
From the opening instrumental track, The Hellion, straight through to the very last note on Devil's Child, this is one taught, tense, paranoid, explosive, headbanging, devil-horn masterstroke.
What does it say that the biggest hit in their career, while catchy as fuck, is perhaps the weakest track on the album? It says that you should fire up the Rhapsody, Napster, or whatever you use to stream, or torrent, or better yet, just buy the damned thing.
As soon as I publish this I am logging on to Rock Band on my Wii and buying the album for game play. At least Electric Eye. Which is Breaking the Law times 1000 only more assured and terrifying.
The wall of monster sound on this record would be copied over and over all through the decade until it would almost be a cliche. But this is ground zero.
Damn. 17 year old Allen was an IDIOT.

Grade A+
A Side: Electric Eye, You've Got Another Thing Comin'
BlindSide: Riding on the Wind, Screaming for Vengeance
DownSide: There are no bad tracks on this record.

Reflecting Pool: Green Day - Insomniac

Consider this a different kind of Listening Post and more like a Reflections Column. With Reflecting Pool I will be going back through the catalog of bands that I love and have been following for years. I will try to be as impartial as possible, but I admit that I am biased. This is a little more loosey than the LPs.




Green Day - Insomniac - 1995 (iTunes - Amazon)

Who turned up the guitars?
Seriously? What's with the gargantuan guitar sound? Dirnt is buried so far in the mix he's barely audible. And Armstrong's fighting against his own playing just to be heard.
Which is a shame, because there is a LOT to love on this record. The first half dozen songs clock in at under 2.5 minutes. The punk aesthetic isin full bloom. Say what you have to say, say it with force, get the fuck out. And they do just that. Before you have a chance to latch onto a theme or chorus they're off to the next salvo. It's about 4 songs in, on Geek Stink Breath, that any sing-a-longability can be found. If you can get past those fucking guitars. Why are they so LOUD?????
And it's frustrating, you know? Because the songs are fantastic. They better be because they are mired in the wash of GUITARS. Pound for pound I would put these tracks up against Dookie's and they would measure up. In some cases they are better. if you can hear them. (Is that horse dead yet?)
The record is relentless and I mean that in a good way. It has that, as I said, Punk Quality. Like teens/young 20somethings afraid they won't ever find someone else to love them so they marry the first girl that gives them a blowjob. Or like they are so worried that they aren't supposed to be in the club that they play as fast as they can before you figure out that they aren't worth their hype. The CD acts the same way. Before you can get bored and turn it off there's another track blistering through the speakers. Like when Panic Attack rumbles through with it's nervosa bassline, you have already forgotten the previous track, 86 and keep the record spinning, which it's doing just to avoid being discarded like some piece of used jet trash with no self esteem.
Brain Stew is another example of what this record sounds like. There is no air in that opening guitar section. Just the chords. Loud, brash and powerful. This is punk as metal. And it works. It works hard and it builds upon itself and offers a brain melting guitar solo while evoking some real lennonesque songwriting.
Oh, by now I've accepted the guitars and I'm perfectly happy with it. My only complaint is that I can't get my ipod to go any louder. Why doesn't this go to "11"?
My favorite song on this album is Walking Contradiction. Just a great track.

Grade A
A Side: Geek Stink Breath, Brain Stew
BlindSide: No Pride, Bab's Uvula Who?, Stuart & the Ave., Westbound Sign
DownSide: Panic Attack (It's more theme than substance)