“it definitely gets huge sentimental points as the "resurrection" album of a legendary band whose career was on the ropes. Priest was about to go down in flames like most other glam bands once grunge hit, and they overhauled their approach to show they could stand the test of time -- and Painkiller was so good that it carried them across a 15-year gap until Angel caught the end of the rope.
so like, it's purely enjoyable as a pillar of heavy metal / speed metal, but just as importantly, it's become mythologized as the coronation of everything "heavy metal" is supposed to stand for: endurance through hardship (the trial, Rob's crash, metal losing popularity), technical excellence (Tipton and Downing learned sweep-picking and recruited a drummer with proper double-bass chops instead of Ram It Down's machine), and blue-collar humility (their willingness to assess the landscape and adapt) in a genre that lives for those sentiments.
Painkiller isn't a 4.5 to everyone's tastes, and that's 100% fair, but it has come to represent the heavy-metal dream and is a neat total-package album with just enough wide appeal for fans to plant their flag and say "this is the greatest because it's what I believe in."
and that's how an RBMK reactor exp -- I mean, how you end up with a mountain of 5's on an album that's not necessarily artistically leaps and bounds above the 4.0 crowd.”
Damn. Stellar write-up and assessment.
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