Judas Priest - Creem

The Further Adventures of Judas Priest and the Flivver Of Doom

Screaming For Vengeance
Judas Priest

Joe (Carving Deep Blue Ripples Through The Tissues Of My Mind) Fernbacher, Creem, 11/82

Out here in Metaluna
There are no stairs,
Out here we stumble...

So there I was laying rubber down the boulevard in my orange flivver of doom yapping flapdoddle into a quivering bolus of carburetor fumes that’d been swirling about my head all day; my Walkman playing strange, unnatural games with the collected earwax of a decade--Love’s long forgotten guitar opus, “Love Is More Than Words Or Better Late Than Never,” being the sonic culprit in this particular war on my nerves--when all of the inevitable sudden I find Love tooned out and the radio tooned in.

Dazed? Well, let’s just say somewhat more bewildered than before, and at least a little confused to be sure. So, standing on the verge of saying something ending in an exclamation point for the first time in weeks, I adjusted my paisley tarboosh and for a brief moment focused onto this persistent gnarring sound emanating from my flivver’s tiny, radio speakers: a sound that could’ve easily been mistaken for a drunken Krell’s lamentations to a young Anne Francis; a sound that hypnotically kept beckoning me to scream for vengeance.

After doing so--unflinchingly I might add, and, frightening a few babies and dogs in the process, I realize that, lo and behold, this lilting fantasia of noise belonged to none other than Judas Priest, the band that make even metalboys cry the blues in those lost, lonely mercurochromed fits of dawn’s early light.

I also realized in a snit of clarity that I don’t know HOW to drive, I never did, and that I don’t own a flivver of doom, let alone a car. Joggling my head around a few times in hopes of figuring out just what was going on, I came to the even slower realization that I was, yea and verily, sitting in my own bedroom, a jorum of Schlitz Light sloshing back and forth in front of me as if it had just been set down violently, and somehow was just coming out of some kind of joyous narcosonic scream-dream...the windows rattling as if they’d just been kicked by John Wayne’s ghost...the air conditioner whirring along at downhill speeds...a snow storm (huh?) raging peacefully outside like some lost metaphor in search of a sentence; and a gentle thud, thud, thudding at my chamber door.

So what, you might ask, was the sonic-ambrosia responsible for returning me to (these) gritty shores of Metaluna and, subsequently, consciousness? It was, in fact as well as in deed, the NEW Judas Priest album, Screaming For Vengeance, and I was “supposed” to be jotting down some drubs and drabs of criticalese for the masses to munch and mull over in between their Cocoa-Puffs and MTV.

Well.

Say, this LP’s jake by me! It comes rushing headlong at you like a pair of knuckle-dusters being slammed, unceremoniously of course, up side yo’ head.

On song after song the Priest heathenishly rumple the brow with their unnerving understanding of the limitless direction of metal’s future. They say the simplest things usually lead to the most brilliant of conclusions, well, whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter, because it’s worked for the Priest. What they’re doing is reworking the basic consciousness of metal itself taking it from a nostalgic spirit of lonesome guitar solos and pseudo-nihilistic blues derivatives to one churning, rhythmic, complexity. They’ve shuttled the beast from infancy to teenhood. All by realizing the potential of having two guitarists play as one. (Granted not the most original of ideas, but put in the context of metal, it makes a world of difference.)

Especially, when the two guitarists are Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, once described as the Dante and Virgil of metal guitar players. Their well-thought-out flips of rhythm and gelatinous texturings, coupled with Rob Halford’s taut, night terror screams, make the Priest a venturesome band of metal martinets calm in their continuing vision (they used to, after all, open for the original Sabbath way back when) and secure in their slickness, proving conclusively that practice does, indeed, make perfect.

After a listen to Screaming For Vengeance, all else pales, even those metal bands that ARE good like Def Leppard, Girlschool, and Van Halen. This record is about as far ahead of its time as Black Sabbath’s Sabotage was, still is and probably always will be.

Side two is about as flawless as the skin on Kubrick’s Starchild in 2001. If you can listen to “Screaming For Vengeance” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” (both sure-fire hits), “Fever” and the chilling “Devil’s Child,” without getting excited enough to go into the living room and kick the TV set in and set fire to your older brother, then mister either you’re a better man than I or you’re ready for the killing floor and I’ll be your Judas Goat!

Side One sets up side two with such perfection that it almost escapes criticism (I said almost). “Take These Chains, Pain and Pleasure” is a bit much...but then again didn’t someone once say, “To escape from metal you must bury yourself in it...”? Well, “Shovel on,” I say, “Shovel on...”

So there I was in my persimmon-colored Fokker dropping a pair of Ozzy Osbourne’s boots on the enemy camp, my Victrola skipping out a crackling version of...

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