But, hey, what’s in a name? It’s the music that counts, right? And the music on Sermons of the Sinner, which features the fine metallic stylings of Tim “Ripper” Owens on vocals, and three guys that you can google yourself, is awesome.
It’s also a trip that it came out twenty years after Demolition, the final studio album Owens recorded with Judas Priest before becoming metal’s most prolific journeyman singer; his most popular projects being ICED EARTH and YNGWIE MALMSTEEN. I find it funny how the classic style and production sounds timeless compared to the hyper-compressed, down-tuned 90s metal of Demolition and its predecessor Jugulator. I’m not knocking these albums, mind you; I’m just saying they definitely sound of their time.
Sermons of the Sinner, on the other hand, sounds like Judas Priest in an alternate reality, in which the group never jettisoned the progressive elements from their 70s albums, and then made Defenders of the Faith; just without that “doof” echo-y gated drum effect and as a fully-realized and complete album. You know what I’m talking about, how Defenders of the Faith starts off as one of the greatest metal albums of all time and ends on a whimper with the ninth track, “Heavy Duty”, turning into the closing track “Defenders of the Faith” before fading out.
Anyway, I digress. Regarding the progressive influence, “Metal Through and Through” and “Return of the Sentinel” are eight and nine minutes respectively, and have a bunch of different parts in them; head banging parts, slower marching parts, even acoustic parts. Oh, and I KNOW this will come up, so let’s just bludgeon the elephant in the room and belittle all the IRON MAIDEN sycophants who have no taste and actually like the new Iron Maiden album; these two songs are how you do epic, prog-influenced heavy metal right. See, for long songs to be good, interesting, and compelling, they have to have several parts in them, not just ONE part that goes on for ten straight minutes without any changes.
I’ve talked to two of my friends about Sermons, and they’ve told me that the album “just sounds like a throwback to Painkiller”, and that it’s “derivative.” You both are on crack. Oh, so K.K. Downing is being “derivative” of a style that HE invented, eh? He’s doing HIS thing? It sounds like Painkiller, because Owens is doing high-pitch shrieks the way Rob Halford has always done high-pitch shrieks; K.K. Downing is playing traditional metal riffs, melodic note runs, and classic solos like he’s done for his entire career; and songs like “Sermon of the Sinner” is a proto-speed metal anthem, kinda like the ones Judas Priest played in the 70s, like “Exciter” and “Call for the Priest”? Does it bother you that “Raise Your Fists” and “Brothers of the Road” recall the Defenders of the Faith classic “Rock Hard Ride Free”? Do you think it’s a bad thing that “Wild and Free” sounds inspired by “Freewheel Burning”? You prefer the somnambulistic new Iron Maiden album to Sermons of the Sinner? You guys are dumb and sound like old people.
Speaking of “Call for the Priest”, what’s kind of odd, I think, is that the second to last track on Sermons, “Hail for the Priest”, precedes that final aforementioned, nine-minute epic sequel to the “The Sentinel”, yet the lyrics upon listening are more like the former song, with lines like “blood runs like a river/the graveyard’s turning red/a figure turns to face me/they are the living dead… the bell it chimes/the graveyard in the mist/the figures stand in darkness/one tries to resist.”
And, okay, fair enough, some of the lyrics are little, eh, how do I say it? Well, I wish Downing would have hired a lyric writer, because some of the “all for one, one for all, brothers of metal” lyrics are a little cliché, trite, and contrived. I mean, you don’t need to keep reiterating your metal bona fides to me! You’re there, dude.
Except when Tim “Ripper” Owens shouts, “There’s METAL in the air!” on the opening song, “Hellfire Thunderbolt.” I actually thought that was pretty cool. Speaking of cool lyrics, “Sacerdote y Diablo” is a neato song about how a priest made a deal with the devil to enslave all of humanity, before destroying the world. Wait, why would you want to destroy the world after enslaving humanity? I guess, because there’s no logic with the devil. But, then, the devil betrays the priest, which makes sense, because he’s the devil, but at the end of the song, “they both lie in the dust.” So, what happened? Is K.K. Downing just saying that evil does not pay? I don’t get it. Maybe he should have hired a lyric writer.
You know what does pay, though? Buying Sermons of the Sinner! they packed the CD with the LP, so once you get done blasting it on your car stereo with the windows down on that long stretch of freeway, you can come home and slap the damn thing onto your turntable, since this is 1985, and people still buy music and drive on long stretches of freeway with their windows down.
Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
16th October, 2021
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