Judas Priest-Nostradamus

Epic
2008


There are so many ways I could approach this review. I could state that it has been 18 years since Priest have done a good album and that this streak will now continue on. Perhaps I could equate this album to feeling very hungry and then opening a refrigerator full of food that is all of the food is rotten and moldy. Or I could say that I didn't have to be Nostradamus to predict that this album was going to be poor. None of those really tell enough about what did or didn't happen on this album though. I should be judging this as a Priest album and I did, but I couldn't help but think about Iron Maiden while listening to this release. Maiden and Priest were arguably the two best metal bands of the 1980's yet now Maiden can do something like 2006's "A matter of life and death" which is full of epics and all of them work. Priest set out to do this two disc set filled with epics and quite honestly virtually nothing works on this album. So why is that? Well, I think it's because Maiden have long been about building their songwriting skills and adding on thus epics have become a natural progression for them. Priest had some tracks like "The Sentinel" and "Victim of changes" that were not epics per se, but they certainly use a certain amount of storytelling elements and they do it well. However these were exceptions because Priest were primarily about go for the throat metal rockers and that's what worked for them. That doesn't mean they can't grow, but you have to know your limitations or else you end up with two discs full of boring crud and some of the worst written material of the year. I thought Halford and Tipton were talking back around 1987-1988 about realizing that they shouldn't have used synthesizers of Turbo because it wasn't metal and it wasn't them. So why are they using synths again? I have no idea, but they overuse them and they serve to bore me to tears and lose my attention before the vocals or the main guitar riffs actually kick. I wasn't too big on "Angel of retribution" because I felt that it seemed forced yet Nostradamus is even less of a real Judas Priest album. That's sad because this band was so steady from the mid-1970's until the mid-1980's and it's shame to realize that they may not have another good album left in them. Just about every song just meanders around eating up time, but making no impression and largely feeling more like background music or bad horror movie theme songs. Like many fans I thought that when Halford returned to the fold that they would get back to form, but that hasn't happened. Honestly everything Halford did when he was out of Priest was at least good yet not that he is back in this band they can't seem to even get a spark going. I can't quite understand it and don't want to believe it, but unfortunately Judas Priest appear to have spent a long time making a real clunker.

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