Judas Priest - Nostradamus

(Epic, 2008)

Review by Class Warrior

I am a relative newcomer to heavy metal, but I have heard Judas Priest at times during the past twenty years. My first college roommate owned the Painkiller album, which had just been released. I hated it because it sounded nothing like punk rock. I can still see my roommate's mushroom-shaped curly blond mullet headbanging away to the constant stream of metal flowing from his (i.e., my) stereo speakers. That god damn mullet. I haven't seen him or it since my early college years (mushroom mullet flunked out), but I saw plenty of Judas Priest in the years to come.

A year later, I heard "Breaking the Law" while watching Beavis and Butthead. I thought that the song rocked like Hell unleashed, but would not let myself like it. Not punk rock, after all. After that brief experience, it took ten years before I realized that I wanted to hear more Priest. I bought a cheap greatest hits collection at the music store. It featured a rocking live version of "Breaking the Law" and a collection of other all-time metal classics such as "Living After Midnight" and "You've Got Another Thing Coming". I was hooked! I proceeded to get my hands on as much of their music as I could find.

All in all, I consider myself to be a huge fan of Priest. I love the early, mid-period, and late 80s incarnations. I even love fuckin' Turbo. (Aside: Turbo is a great album. A collection of top-notch butt rock tunes. Criminally unappreciated because it has keyboards. As a bonus, the photos of the band included in the album art are sheer hilarity! End of aside.) Last year I completed my collection of the twelve remastered CDs, from Sin after Sin to Painkiller. Each is great. Even their reunion album from 2005 has some great headbanging anthems. Needless to say, I now consider Painkiller, my introduction to Judas Priest, to be a fine listening experience. Thank you, Mushroom Mullet, for exposing me to the fine arts. I wish you had started me off with Hell Bent for Leather or Screaming for Vengeance, but you did what you could.

Two years ago Priest released Nostradamus, a concept album about the prophecies of some French religious mystic dickhead. I bought it when it came out. I have to admit that, even though it was Judas Fucking Priest, I wasn't that excited to listen to the album. Two CDs worth of concept albumage isn't typical listening fodder for a lifetime punk rocker. But hey, it's Priest, so I felt honor-bound to give it a try.

First impression: there are way more keyboards on this album than on Turbo! I wonder if they make the synthesizer player hide offstage during concerts. I listened to the first CD, then put away the album for two years. I have not heard it again until tonight.

Tonight's impression: there are some good rockin' numbers here - "Pestilence & Plague", "Persecution", and "Nostradamus" are standout tracks - but one has to wade through all the instrumentals and weak tracks to get to them. There are very few breaks between songs on the album; it ends up almost being two long songs, sort of like a metal symphony. It's definitely Judas Priest behind these songs - they have the signature dual guitar leads and Rob's voice is uniquely awesome (even if his range isn't as robust as it once was) - but it feels stretched, bloated, and overdone. They could have cut out the filler and made a pretty good 45 minute record.

My main complaint about the album is the subject Priest decided to explore. Who gives a fuck about Nostradamus? There are nearly endless topics of concern for a metal band to explore: illegal wars, torture, the Apartheid regime in Israel, the ongoing threat that capitalist accumulation poses to the environment...the list goes on. Instead Priest feels the ramblings of a centuries-dead nutcase need further explication? Come on. You're not making music for hippies, but headbangers! To be fair to Priest, they've never sung about politics. Most of their lyrics deal with rocking out, being into metal and leather, super- or extra-human strangeness, defiance, teenage alienation, despair, death, etc. There's nothing wrong with those themes, but I would love to hear Rob singing about how hard it is to be a gay metalhead or something like that.

When reviewing metal albums, I use the bloody sword system. Zero bloody swords is horrible garbage, while ten bloody swords would be a mix CD of the best metal songs ever recorded. Nostradamus earns four gore-drenched claymores raised in salute. (If you're curious, all other Priest records [minus the ones with Ripper, which I have not heard] score higher than this.) Four for the music, negative one for the lyrical focus, and positive one because Rob, K.K., Glenn, and Ian have earned it as a lifetime achievement. Just don't make any more fucking albums about bullshit, guys! If not left politics, then let's have some more songs about rocking the fuck out!