JUDAS PRIEST: Sad Wings Of Destiny (HARD ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

In this year 1976, the name of the giant that we know today has not yet had the slightest impact on the general public, and for many, it is indeed this album that will definitively launch their career, by laying the foundations of a style that will influence so many bands. It took Judas Priest two years to release the expected successor of "Rocka Rolla", and to get rid of the contract that binds them to Gull Records. If this first album was composed of many tracks from the period when Atkins was still in the band, Rob Halford is credited here on six of the nine tracks. Starting on a new basis will undoubtedly be very positive for Judas Priest. Indeed, after the patchwork presented on the first album, this one has the merit to have more coherence and to be more direct and catchy.

The monstrous Sabbathian riff of "Victim Of Changes" starts an album without real dead time. The progress is obvious! The music is clean, heavy, with the will to put energy in each track. The album is also strangely built, with improbable but successful sequences, like the ballad "Dreamer Deceiver" which leads to a much faster "Deceiver". In the same way, the piano exercise that is "Epitaph" (in a surprising music-hall style) is followed by "Island Of Domination" with a seductive rhythm that perfectly concludes the album. The blues influences of the beginning are left behind and the voice is finally ready for what will become the heavy-metal ("The Ripper", "Genocide"...).

The understanding between Tipton and Downing is now obvious, with a superb set of double harmonies. Halford's vocals is overpowering on tracks like "Dreamer Deceiver", on which he covers several octaves, or "Victim Of Changes". He also has a certain elegance that he will lose little by little later ("Epitaph"). The powerful and sonorous bass enriches the compositions with always more melodic sense.

Of course, 22 years after its release, "Sad Wings Of Destiny" may seem to have aged poorly, especially since, due to intellectual property issues, Judas Priest will never be able to oversee a reissue of the album. Some of the tracks seem slow compared to the rest of the band's career, with breaks that often remind us of the heaviness of Black Sabbath. However, this opus has immense qualities of composition and reveals a very particular charm if one makes the effort not to think of "Painkiller" while listening to it. The giants Deep Purple and Black Sabbath can start casting suspicious glances from the back of their big chairs. Judas Priest has just stolen their pen and is planning to write a few pages in the big book of hard rock too. - Official website

JUDAS PRIEST

SAD WINGS OF DESTINY

GULL

HARD ROCK