Judas Priest - Sin After Sin

Ahh, Heavy Metal...
Back when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with heavy metal, it kinda struck a chord with my geekyness and shyness, but looking back on it, I can barely listen to most of it as it just seems rather pointless and pathetic. Like an audio version of Dungeons & Dragons. It seems to get all the geekyness and wrap it in a cloak of manufactured malice, which ends up coming across all futile. However Judas Priest are one of the true exceptions. Formed in the industrial city of Birmingham, Priest started off as a kinda post-psychedelic heavy blues band, their first album, Rocka Rolla, a total delight. It's utterly bleak, without veering into the pseudo-gothic pretentions of which the genre is now associated. By their second album, Sad Wings Of Destiny, Priest had refined their sound into a chugging behemoth, not of the Hawkwind/Motorhead style, but more streamlined, more angry. By this, their third album, the blues element had faded, and what we're left with is kinda like metal's 'year zero', in it's new and fresh sound. But was Sin After Sin the first of the new fast metal, or the end of the post-psychedelic heavies?

The album opens up with Sinner, an epic fast paced monster of a track featuring searing vocals, a steady beat and chugging riffage. The signature Priest sound. Halford's voice still has those bluesy influences during the verses, but when it hits the chorus he's screeching in splendid falsetto form. The song features religious imagery presented in a sci-fi way, while musically it's total heavy metal featuring loads of different sections building up an epic feel, with tremendous playing featuring the kind of energy that left Zeppelin and Sabbath choking in their dust. The middle break features a delicious Hendrix take by the now sadly retired K. K. Downing. This however is not the summer of love, this is ghostly and alien, with Halford over the top with menacing imagery before returning to standard form and a more standard approach guitar solo. The track just then builds up to it's climactic... climax, where Rob Halford's voice just gets higher and punchier. Ouch. It's a killer track and one of heavy metal's defining statements. The next track, a cover of Joan Baez's Diamonds And Rust just kicks right off, with a KISS-like riff. It's a more poppier metal, but it's actually good! It doesn't carry the weight of Joan's original, and so feels rather synthetic, and if done by lesser bands, would come off cheap. Here though it just works and just feels right. It's absurd, but it works as a metal song. Also some of Tipton's lead breaks lay the groundwork for their next album, Stained Class. The third track, Starbreaker is kinda the album's let down. It's really average and just kinda plods along in comparison. It's not that it's a bad track, but it lacks any real energy, and the science fiction themes just float above the track in a sub-moorecock fashion. It kinda shows that this album is solid when a track that is merely 'good' is the let down. Side 1 finishes off with The Last Rose Of Summer. See, even these leather clad bastards have a sensitive side. Unlike say, Poison's 'Every Rose has It's Thorn', this track does not feel like plastic emotions sung in order to get into the girl's (or boy's) trousers. There's a distinct post-psychedelic feel to it, which harks back to my theory, that Priest were really the last of the sixties style bands. It's not a great track here, and lyrically it's kinda clunky, but it's a superb ending to the first side of the record, closing it nicely and not giving you any hint at the barbarism that lays ahead. If the first side of this record is the closing swansong of an ageing music, then the second side is the blueprint for metal.

We start off with an instrumental break, Let Us Prey, pseudo-church guitar harmonies which bleed into Call For The Priest,  a balls-to-the-wall proto speed metal headbanging moshpitting slobberknocker of a track. It's fast, it's heavy, it's aggressive, it's got that steady fast beat. It's just a total fun track, played by superb musicians who must've surely known that they were treading new ground. The Let us Prey harmony returns with Halford now inventing power metal with his warrior-like chants before we get into a lovely duelling guitar section leading into another harmonised part just totally down and to the point. The track races to it's climax, leading to the bluesy depression-soaked rock of Raw Deal, describing Halford's experience in a famous gay bar,. The bass pounds through, the music taking various turns throughout, always coming across as bitterness personified as music. It's not bitterness against homosexuals, as Halford himself is gay, but bitterness at how it had to be kept in the dark, hidden. After describing the act of sex, the track then leads into it's climax, with Rob's screams coming through and then slamming into a post coital disregard for what has happened, in total spite. After the frank openness of Raw Deal, we're taken into Here Come The Tears Taking that psychedelic feeling of The Last Rose Of Summer, but taking it to an emotional nadir. There's no optimism here, no pretence, just unrelenting misery and Halford at his most emotive, whilst it builds up into one of the most soul crushing guitar breaks in the whole genre. Soaked in the damp fluids of the blues without sounding fake like Clapton, this just carries the track through dragging us into a resolution. Through the murky waters of despair into an explosion of emotion, which ends it all... until the next track starts to trickle in, Vague watery dots of music which give no hint at the pure anger and hatred present in Dissident Aggressor, the track that has yet to be supassed interms of metal's barbaric intent. The aggressive outlet of all the emotion that has gone on before it. Halford does not sing so much as shoot the words at you, while the rhythm chuggs along propelling us further forward, the solo not much of a solo as a mess of deliciously sharp noise which penetrates the ears before building up struggling and fighting to survive, building up to a sudden end.

This album is perhaps the only metal album you'll find that I'll mark as a 'MUST HAVE'. Because quite simply, if you've heard this album, then you've heard everything the genre has to offer. Like literally, the genre hasn't really progressed since Sin After Sin's release in 1977. Whilst Iron Maiden may have streamlined the music to it's purest form, they never take it further, and likewise the more 'extreme' areas of metal, such as black and death, are essentially Deep Purple with extra shouting.
This LP is also an example of how clever track positions make an album. the whole of the second side is set up to just bring you to an emotional peak, with anger, bitterness and sadness leading into sheer brutality. Whilst metal is seen as something of an embarassment in the music world, I have no problem admitting that I just really enjoy this record.