Judas Priest Book:

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Editorial Review:

Judas Priest: Heavy Metal Painkillers-An Illustrated History Reviews:
Judas Popoff!!!!
2008-02-16 - Very well done mate... and THANK YOU! A ton of memorabalia, photos, and informed writing make this a MUST for every Priest and Metal fan on the the planet! Martin does a wonderful job chronicling the Priest's career album by album and remains subjective throughout, as every REAL fan can appreciate.

Of course, Priest are the world's second and purest Metal band there has ever been! After Sabbath..it was Rob Halford and this slicing Heavy Metal that really defined the genre better than any other band, including Black Sabbath!

Simply...a real feast of Priest is served here.

The Priest Rule
2008-02-02 - I really liked this book. From the early days to now. He really kept it interesting.
I,of course, was not crazy about the indivial critisism of each and every album at length. Sometimes it just seemed tooooo long.
I felt he did a good job of the bands history without their consent.
The day they consent to a full history; that's the one I realy want to see. Until then, this is pretty good.
Visit Judas Priest INFO pages if you want to know more and remember to take it with grain of salt.
sp

Highly readable chronicling of Priest's 35-year history
2007-12-22 - "Judas Priest: Heavy Metal Painkillers" is a very good chronicling of the band's 35-year history by Martin Popoff. The book is 380 pages and full of colored photos and illustrations of band members, album covers, magazine covers, etc.

Popoff devotes 25 chapters to tell Priest's story, one chapter per each official studio & live album, as well as chapters devoted to "the early years" and all side projects of band members, such as Fight, Halford, Glenn Tipton and Two.

Martin rightly stresses Priest's most innovative and prolific years from 1976-1979 wherein they released four incredible albums that pulsate with creativity: SAD WINGS OF DESTINY (1976), SIN AFTER SIN (1977), STAINED CLASS (1978) and HELL BENT FOR LEATHER (1979). Popoff states that, if Priest did nothing else significant in the rest of their entire career, they are worthy of eternal respect and awe for these works alone.

It has been said that Black Sabbath created heavy music, but Judas Priest created metal. The above four albums testify to this with songs like "Tyrant," "Dreamer Deceiver," "The Sinner," "Let Us Prey," "Dissident Aggressor," "Exciter," "Stained Class," "Beyond the realms of Death," "Saints in Hell," "Burning Up" and "Delivering the Goods." Sabbath may have given birth to doom, gothic and stoner metal, but Priest gave birth to power, speed, progressive and epic metal.

In 1980 the Priest boys dumbed everything down to create the first and greatest kindergarten metal album -- BRITISH STEEL. Okay, I'm joking a bit so don't get your tail-feathers ruffled, but ya gotta admit that, compared to the four incredibly innovative albums that preceded it, BRITISH STEEL is a very simple and juvenile piece. But, you know what? It WORKS. Priest were ready for something new at this point and wanted to expand their creative parameters by working LESS hard (!) and making an album full of simpler, more pop-friendly numbers. Priest proved that they can create and perform power pop metal better than anyone.

In the decade following BRITISH STEEL Priest was all over the place: 1981's POINT OF ENTRY was an interesting experiment with pop rock mixed with power metal, but it failed. 1982 featured Priest's all-time best selling album and certainly one of the best power metal albums of all-time SCREAMING FOR VENGEANCE. 1984 showed the band resting on their laurels with DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH, essentially SCREAMING II. 1986 brought forth their worst album ever -- TURBO -- which isn't even metal, more like new wave pop rock. The album went platinum so it wasn't a financial failure, and it did prove that Priest could write really good 80's pop rock, but in hindsight the majority of Priest fans qualify it as their darkest, most embarrassing hour. 1988 issued forth TURBO's heavier brother RAM IT DOWN. Popoff decries the album as lifeless, but nothing could be further from the truth. RAM IT DOWN proved that Priest could write and perform 80's hair metal better than any glam band. I stayed clear of the album for many years because I don't particularly like hair metal, but I recently bought RAM IT DOWN and, I gotta admit, it WORKS for what it is. And it's anything but lifeless. The disk is full of pizzazz with quality cuts like "Hard as Iron," "Blood Red Skies," "Heavy Metal," "I'm a Rocker" and "Monsters of Rock," not to mention the blazing lead solos on "Ram it Down." I was genuinely surprised. RAM IT DOWN is mandatory Priest.

In 1990 Priest returned to their 1982-84 style with PAINKILLER, adding a thrashier edge. It's a fine disk with quality cuts like "Touch of Evil," "Nightcrawler," "Between the Hammer and the Anvil" and the titular cut, but a tad overrated IMHO. Singer Rob Halford left after the PAINKILLER tour and would not record with the band again for fifteen long years.

1996-2003 gave us two studio albums and two live disks with young new singer Ripper Owens. Popoff generally writes off this era in the band's history, but nothing could be further from the truth. Metal was supposedly no longer 'hip' during these years (who cares?) but Priest flew the flag high with 1997's JUGULATOR and 2001's DEMOLITION. JUGULATOR is the band's most brutal album ever (even though it has an undeniable cartooney and colorful air), proving that they can out-riff, out-write and out-perform any thrash, speed or death metal band out there. Take my word for it, JUGULATOR kicks total axe and the songs are ultra-catchy. As for DEMOLITION, it's the band's heaviest, most modern-sounding moment with stellar and innovative cuts like "Subterfuge," "Hell is Home," "Metal Messiah," "Machine Man" and "Feed on Me." Say what you want, but JUGULATOR and DEMOLITION are two red-hot smokin' albums that utterly blow Halford's by-the-numbers RESURRECTION (2000) out of the water. In other words, Priest did anything but rest on their laurels while Halford was absent.

Lastly, the book chronicles 2005's ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION which is highlighted by the return of the "metal god" on vocals. ANGEL reverts to the style of PAINKILLER but is more mature and arguably better. Unfortunately Popoff wrongly disses one of Priest's better mellow tunes "Angel" and ridiculously lambastes "Lochness," which is actually one of the album's highlights, a highly creative epic doom metal masterpiece, in fact. To his credit Martin cites numerous other peoples' more positive take on the song. (Give the song another listen, Martin, it's a great piece).

Popoff interestingly observes the numerous "er" songs in the Priest catalog -- songs about some sci-fi/horror character ending with the "er" sound. For example, "Ripper," "Deceiver," "The Sinner," "Starbreaker," "Exciter," "Invader," "Grinder," "Steeler," "Jawbreaker," "Painkiller," "Nightcrawler," "Abductors," "Demonizer" and "Hellrider." It's so obvious but it never occured to me before.

I should close by pointing out that Popoff has progressed as a writer in the last decade. With his first "Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal" he had a tendency to occasionally go off on brief rants of nonsensical prattle. You'll see little of this with "Judas Priest: Heavy Metal Painkillers." It's highly readable, full of quotes from the band members, as well as those connected to the band, and is valuable, even mandatory, to any Priest fan.