Don Airey's great, yeah, a suitable replacement for Jon Lord. I just don't like Steve Morse playing Blackmore's parts (although he's certainly a fine guitarist). When I last saw Priest KK had more energy than anyone else and it seems like that was the case on that tour. To Halford's credit, he still sounds great and he really improved both his stage presence and sound after a slump a few years ago... so that's definitely impressive. I dunno, I think they should really strive to get KK back - it seems like some bullshit that they don't.

It seemed like there was personal issues involved in that decision, judging from an article I just read where he kind of discussed the departure. I do think it would be cool, but I'll be honest; when I saw them with KK they didn't play half the songs I wanted to hear. Not sure if it was a personal set decision choice or what but after seeing them last night with their current musicians, they tore the roof off the place. And yeah Rob is an absolute animal, no idea how he still does it.

I'd love to see Purple live. Sure, it'd be better probably when they were young and had Blackmore... but I stand by my opinion that Infinite was the album of the year last year. Marvelous stuff. I don't think they've really lost anything in terms of quality so much as just heaviness and speed.

I just saw them a week ago. Absolutely still killing it!

I gotta ask an unrelated question to the Priest/Purple discussion.

I am looking to buy some early Protector stuff. I got some options:

a) go for the "Echoes Of The Past" CD - this is the cheapest option. It also has the plus of not being remastered in any way. The minus is that it is everything on one CD (demo, Misantrophy and Golem) and I kinda dislike those setups

b) go with the High Roller reissues on individual CD's - this is more expensive and is remastered in some form. I also read on discogs that Misantrophy is presented in some other version that is reworked and more thrashy and not the original 1987 vinyl. This would make a no-go for me.

c) go with the High Roller CD version of Misantrophy (as it is the only one except the above compilation CD) and hunt down an original Atom H pressing of "Golem" - this is most expensive one as the lowest price of the first pressing of "Golem" I have seen is 70-80 euros.

Help me out fellow metalheads!

KK only wanted to come back because of his then impending bankruptcy. There's definitely personal issues between the band and KK, but I'm not sure KK wanted to come back for any other reason other than a payday.

Ι saw Priest this summer and just wanted to say that Rob sounded very good, he only got tired for the last twenty minutes of the show. I'll say this. No matter how many people want to hear Painkiller they should just remove it from the set. It's really throwing him under the bus, it sounds bad and sad. Plenty of other great songs to play.

Richie is fantastic as the lead guitarist, vice-frontman while Andy Sneap was kinda an afterthought. I would love to see KK back but honestly, it's gonna look weird now, Richie has been set up as a younger version of him. Will they re-invent him as a new Glenn with guitar and haircut and all?

Painkiller absolutely ruled when I saw them live and Rob didn't get tired at all during any moment of the set. Sounds like you had a bad night; I saw them twice in the last 3 years and both times they were flawless. Actually everyone in the band was on point and very exciting to watch and hear, the entire stadium was losing their shit when they played it towards the end of their set.

Musically it was perfect. Vocally it was just screeching with very cringey "this!" "is!" parts that were very weak falsettos maxed volume-wise, with all the necessary delays that just accentuated the weakness of said parts. It wasn't a bad night, quite the opposite really, he was FANTASTIC throughout the show until the last twenty minutes when he was obviously more tired. Fans applauded anyway and enjoyed the song and you have to appreciate an essentially elder man slaughtering his chords for the sake of our entertainment. Personally, I think he doesn't need to prove anything and Painkiller isn't even an essential song (I missed The Sentinel personally and nobody questions the absence of Victim of Changes for example...)

The Ripper though, holy fucking shit, I lost it there, he NAILED it.

We didn't even get The Ripper here

Halford was solid for the most part. I hate, HATE how he butchers some vocal lines though, like fucking up the tempo of some lines in Sinner (and in a previous show a few years ago he just basically "spoke" the lines to Dissident Aggressor, WTF). At least he never disappoints during Painkiller, and this time he actually bothered singing most lines from Breaking the Law (last time he let the crowd sing the ENTIRE song, like... what? literally the whole song!).

Deep Purple was good too, but... Ian Gillan can't sing those high notes anymore. He just can't. It was made painfully obvious during Space Trucking, you know that one part near the end? Yeah he didn't even attempt to reach those notes, no doubt because he knew he couldn't. Must be the same reason why Child in Time, by far the best Purple song, wasn't on the setlist.

It's OK, they're old and past their prime and all, I understand the unfortunate reality of it and it doesn't make them less talented. But it's undeniable IMO.

I'm ok with Purple showing their age though because they don't have the same kind of intensity that JP does. And Priest being old never really showed during the concerts I've seen them, except for maybe the fact that Rob can't be as animated as he used to. Didn't really fuck any lines up or anything like that.

Guys, check this out. What if instead of being called Cirith Ungol, they were called Cirith Bunghole? Right? Just saying.

Why would you want Ripper when you had Halford??

notsureifserious.gif

I think he thought you were talking about Tim Owens rather than the song with that title.

Ah fuck they did play it? They didn't play it at Tinley Park. Would have been awesome. Everything else sounded good however. Didn't bother staying for Deep Purple, I saw em last year with Alice Cooper and it was pretty boring. Then again the chances of getting upstaged playing after Priest or Cooper are pretty high.

Yeah, we got a pretty exciting setlist actually. Missed quite a few classics but got some nice surprises too.

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/judas-pr ... bf8be.html

This was my first time seeing Halford. For various reasons I couldn't make it to Athens for the other gigs except for the first time they visited in 2001 (with Ripper - the man ), which was a phe-no-me-nal show but I always said that "I have not seen Priest live" because Rob is, well, Rob. Apart from one show, most people would tell me that Rob had lost it, about changing the vocal lines or letting the audience sing Breaking the Law, so I went in very apprehensive. I was basically just hoping to catch some of his aura, hear his voice (normal range, just that magical timbre).

But he fucking nailed it almost the entire night. You can see it's a long set too. Everyone told me that I was beyond lucky because that was the best they had heard Halford in Greece bar the solo show in 2000 (when he had no problems at all) and really, this time it felt that I was seeing Priest much more than then the time I saw them with Ripper. There is something really fucking special about Rob's voice and presence, I guess most will understand what I'm saying. As a bonus, I had the Sacral Rage singer next to me and he was doing all the screams along with Rob (even some that he didn't do, haha) and it was a great company overall, so that gig was special.

Since I wrote this much, might as well, throw the full extent of the experience: imagine two days: Accept, Saxon, Priest, Maiden <-- the heavy metal history right there, of course they all killed, Maiden being the clear winners and Bruce Dickinson being better than the DVDs, which fucking blew my mind away. Biggest metal concert in Greece too, about 40 thousand people on the Maiden day (15-17 thousand for the Saxon, Accept, Priest day, so now we know how many metal "tourists" we have in Greece as we call them!).

And in Crete I saw Udo doing the Accept classics for the last time (great, not his best show though), HEAT who were surprisingly very entertaining with an awesome frontman and then in my hometown we had Diamond Head (they now have a good singer and it was incredibly moving hearing some songs) and fucking Coroner, which was probably the highlight of the entire summer season. I just friggin' worship that band and they delivered 100% and played Son of Lilith which is my favorite Coroner song.

Yeah hence my notsureifserious... I refuse to believe Opus would be this obtuse and prefer to believe he was joking instead


Damn that's a better setlist than what we had tbh

I don't understand why Priest would ever neglect to play 'Beyond the Realms of Death'. It's only their best song by a mile.

Would definitely have loved to hear that one. That and the Sentinel, which is probably the definitive heavy metal song for me. I cannot express how much I love that song, since I saw it as a kid from that live in Texas. That was my first exposure and what I see in my head when I think Judas Priest. I never got super deep into the 70s studio albums, I really like them of course but I much prefer the live energy they had in the 80s (so, Priest Live! > Unleashed...).

Rob narrating dystopian sci-fi shit is probably the most metal thing ever. The knives fly out like bullets!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fl7yNIPlGM

Smilies. I won't use them.
That was my contribution to the discussion about a band I really don't care about anymore. They can tour for decades with whatever line up they want. It will not effect my day to day life.
I believe this is what we will see in the future, old band touring endlessly, playing for people who want to see old bands, any old bands.

See in the future? Oh my sweet summer child, old men touring endlessly, playing for people who want to see old bands, is already our reality.

But this wasn't about the lineup, it was about the setlist/choice of songs.

Good gods, were you serious when you talked about Ripper? You actually thought I meant the old singer? O_o

But this wasn't about the lineup, it was about the setlist/choice of songs.

Good gods, were you serious when you talked about Ripper? You actually thought I meant the old singer?

You will never know.

I'm fine with Beyond The Realms of Death being sacrificed for Saints In Hell.

I want KK back as much as anyone, but he is really, REALLY not helping his case with a new fucking drama clickbait thread every fucking day on blabbermouth. Makes me want to hack up Bori with a meat cleaver.

In other news, fuck writer's block.

Eh, I'd rather they kept 'Beyond the Realms of Death', played 'Saints in Hell' too, and sacrificed just about anything from 'British Steel' ('Rapid Fire' is safe... for now) or the completely putrid 'Point of Entry'.

Word. Although I really enjoyed Metal Gods and Grinder.

I went to see Priest and Deep Purple last night, and it ended up being moved inside last minute due to a tornado in the area. They clearly weren't prepared for that possibility, because everything turned into a disorganized shitshow. We came out of it smelling like roses though, ending up 4 rows from the front despite our 30$ tickets!

Halford sounded good for the most part, although there was clearly too much encore, as his voice was shot by the end. The setlist was pretty solid too. Freewheel Burning! My only real complaint is the way Richie Faulkner plays the solo in "You Got Another Thing Coming." That solo is all about the swaggering lead, and he just shredded all over it. Totally inappropriate.

So last night on my way home from work, Metallica's Until it Sleeps came on the radio. My first thought was, "Whoa, haven't heard this is a while." And I think I actually enjoyed it more than I ever have. And keep in mind Load was my first Metallica album, which I loved at the time, my second metal/metal related album, and it didn't take very many years for me to love their 80s work and pretty much abandon Load. I don't know if it was just a strong sense of nostalgia or what.

It's a good song. The disappointment with Load wasn't so much the quality of the songwriting but the nature of the songwriting, their direction,their vision and style and this whole superficial "we got over the immature metal shit". So, "good song or not, fuck them" was pretty much my take on it then.

I'd honestly rank Load as the best Metallica album since the 80's. The Black Album is a close second but is clearly in "sellout to the mainstream" territory where it sounds like classic Metallica with lots of sellout connections to what people wanted to hear at the time, but Load sounds like what the band really wanted to be playing and taken on its own is a strong sampling of pretty dark 90's rock.

Add me to the "hey I just saw Judas Priest and Deep Purple last night!" train going on in this here. It was a special night! Both bands absolutely fucking killed it. Rob "Heavy Metal Santa" Halford sounded just as good tonight as he did when I first saw them 10 years ago. Deep Purple was a complete force. I was a little disappointed they didn't have any cds at the merch booth though.

Holy hell, I just realized that as of a few weeks ago, I've been posting here for 10 years! Here's to you, Metal-Archives.

Abhorrence (Fin) apparently released a new EP some week ago, which is their first new songs since '91, and they're quite good:

https://abhorrencefin.bandcamp.com/albu ... assophobic

Interesting.. where I live we had 6 tornadoes just the next evening, Sept 21st around 5-6 PM eastern time. Where do you live ?

Minnesota.

Felt bored and decided to skim through the report histories of some Christian black metal bands looking for some putz who thinks that shit doesn’t belong in the genre. This is my favorite and it’s relatively recent. https://www.metal-archives.com/report/view/id/619952

That reminds me of a review I read for some other christian black metal band. I've tried to find it again a few times with no success. iirc the guy just complained about christians infecting the genre in really broken english so it probably got deleted at some point.

LOL.