JUDAS PRIEST — Angel Of Retribution (review)

JUDAS PRIEST — Angel Of Retribution album cover

Album · 2005 · Heavy Metal

4/5 · 2022-04-22
Warthur

Look, I really don't think it was Ripper Owens' fault his tenure as frontman of Judas Priest was a bit of a wet fart as far as the studio albums from that era go. The live albums he fronted proved he had the chops to handle classic Priest material, and I don't even hate Jugulator; even though it isn't an album which tries to sound much like Judas Priest, it was at least trying to sound like something. Demolition, on the other hand, was an absolute turd, the band being so scared of committing too hard to any musical direction they ended up square in the middle of the road - and ended up run over.

After that disaster, and with Rob Halford's solo career hovering at the level of "respectable, but not setting the world on fire", it was perhaps inevitable that Ripper would be making his exit and the Painkiller-era lineup of Priest would reunite sooner or later. Angel of Retribution is very much a "the gang's all back together and we're playing in the classic style you love" sort of affair for most of its running time, so don't expect Judas Priest to push the boundaries of their sound like they did on Painkiller - this is very much an album which finds Priest in their comfort zone.

Still, when you're a band as accomplished as Priest, your comfort zone can be pretty big. Within the first two songs you get a dose of their heavier side (Judas Rising) and their poppier side (Deal With the Devil), and perhaps one of the notable things you pick up early on is that they seem to be balancing those two instincts perfectly; even the heaviest moments on here have their hooks to keep you nodding along and make sure things aren't too oblique and inaccessible, and even the poppiest moments have their harder edge. This is a balance which sometimes eluded Priest even in their classic period, so it's nice to hear them finding that sweet spot here.

The major departure from that comes towards the end of the album; Eulogy is a quieter moment of the sort we'd rarely heard on Priest albums since their early days, and then the closing Lochness is the deepest they'd gotten into, if not full on prog-metal, then at least a prog-influenced epic song structure since Victim of Changes on Sad Wings of Destiny. Since they followed this with an honest-to-goodness two-disc concept album about Nostradamus, this perhaps pointed the direction in which Priest were planning to evolve their sound after this.

For most of its duration, however, Angel of Retribution isn't really about an evolution of Priest's sound - or even a Revolution, despite there being a song of that name on here - so much as it's about reasserting what Priest is all about to begin with. It does that very successfully, and whilst this means it isn't in the top tier of Priest albums (which I'd reserve for those releases where they really pushed their sound forward in a major way), it's certainly a return to form compared to anything they did in the studio with Ripper.