In the world of heavy metal, it isn’t every day that a ball-hair strippingly good album is released. Nor is it every day that a band makes up a new word. Yet on the day in 1990 when Priest’s “Painkiller” album was unleashed upon the metal markets, both of these irregularities occurred. For “Painkiller” wasn’t just one of the best albums that has ever been released in the genre, but also the only recording (bar tributes) that will ever contain the utterance of ‘Paratamize’.
“Painkiller” was - and still is - such an influential record, that even the little fact that some of the words that were sung weren’t actually real could not distract from the sheer perfection of it all. And yet despite this, the album still has the Priest fan base in two distinct camps. There are those that herald it as the best thing that Judas Priest ever recorded and those that feel that the high-pitched shrieks and relentless guitar attack pushed Priest too far away from their hot rockin’ past. But whilst “Painkiller” might have been a good few steps up the extreme ladder, this was just the band’s attempt of joining in with the current music scene.
And what a good effort - each and every song is an absolute metal classic. “Hell Patrol”, “One Shot at Glory”, “Metal Meltdown” and the title track, are all completely flawless. The guitar partnership of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing has never sounded better and Halford is on the best vocal from of his career. So consistently does the frontman reach implausibly high notes that trying to mimic him is almost a game in itself.
Yet of course, this wasn’t for everyone. For those Priest fans that had been comforted by the band’s hard rock for the last decade, this came as quite a shock – they had never really expected anything quite this extreme. Yet for anyone else that really wants to hear an album that ranks as one of the best in the genre, this is it.
Sadly however, Halford was to leave Judas Priest after this album, only for Priest to go down roads which would fail to see them even come close to this masterful music. And whilst the band might have reunited in recent years, and released the quite superb “Angel of Retribution”, it is unlikely that they’ll ever reach this sort of musical zenith ever again.
“Painkiller” is everything I love about metal.
