Artist: Judas Priest
Release Title: Defenders Of The Faith
Release Type: Full Length Album
Release Year: 1984
Artist Genre: Heavy Metal
Artist Origin: UK
My Rating: 92%
Track Listing: 1. Freewheel Burning 2. Jawbreaker 3. Rock Hard Ride Free 4. The Sentinel 5. Love Bites 6. Eat Me Alive 7. Some Heads Are Gonna Roll 8. Night Comes Down 9. Heavy Duty 10. Defenders Of The Faith
Total playing time: 39:02
If you consider yourself a big Priest fan you can't consider "British Steel" their best and if you do, I'm sorry but you deserve to be chained up and have rotten fruit thrown at you for a month. The shortlist should involve releases like "Screaming For Vengeance", "Sad Wings Of Destiny", "Stained Class" and this, "Defenders Of The Faith". For me this is the best Priest release, a hair over "Sad Wings Of Destiny" because everything we love about metal, the 80's and Priest is best on show here. It's got the anthemic choruses, the riffs, the glass shattering Halford shrieks and the Tipton Downing guitar flair peaking out. This is the last awesome Priest release and DEFINITELY one of the top 3 metal releases of all time. You can hear a mp3 upload of the album track "The Sentinel". That mp3 track is perhaps the best song off the album.
What makes the album so bow worthy is the range of tracks, the anthems and the performance in general. The tracks range from the blistering speed metal of "Freewheel Burning", "Jawbreaker", "The Sentinel" and "Eat Me Alive" to the more anthemic "Rock Hard Ride Free" and "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll" to the broody sinister "Love Bites" to the well done balladic "Night Comes Down", you can really tick off all the different approaches of well done traditional metal. However, the release, whilst soaring in front of everybody else in the metal classics race, sort of trips and stumbles over the finish line. If only they'd left "Heavy Duty" off. The track is just really cheesy and it makes me think of Spinal Tap seen as they had a track called that, also Spinal Tap were out the year of this record. Was it a salute to Nigel Tufnel and co? Who knows but it's where the skip button is needed and then the release closes with an outro called "Defenders Of The Faith". Oh well....still doesn't tarnish the fact the release is a wonder and you just HAVE to own it, if you like classic metal in even the slightest bit. Check out mp3 downloads of the album tracks I recommended and if you love it as much as me buy it from Amazon.
