Judas Priest - Killing Machine (Hell Bent for Leather)

THREE NIGHTS ONLY! LIVE IN YOUR LIVING ROOM, JUDAS PRIEST SELLS OUT!!

That's stupid. Everybody calls Killing Machine a terrible turn to Arena Rock. What were they supposed to do? Heavy Metal wasn't a mainstream genre in the 70s, but Judas Priest was getting too big to not play enormous international concerts. They had to fill those stadiums, and the only way to do that was to appeal to a much broader audience. The evil gothic priest image wasn't gonna do it, so leather and motorcycles and sing-along choruses seemed like the only possible choice.

Remember, Priest was a pre-New Wave heavy metal band; they were competing with punk and glam and Black Sabbath, and nobody was really sure that this would work in America. That school shooting Bob Geldof felt perfectly fine satirizing? Let's change the title to Hell Bent for Leather and not sabotage our profits off the bat, guys. Why not try an acoustic ballad, yeah of course, make it sound evil, obviously.

Yes, there a couple terrible songs on this album (Evening Star and Take on the World), but mostly it's dark, bluesy, dangerous music. Too well produced for the die hard fans? See my review of Metallica's Black album.

Is it their best album? Hell no, but there are some great songs on it. Metal is so diverse and ridiculous because it's founded on the idea of extreme. Faster, louder, meaner, darker, sadder, whatever; take the thing you do and do it more. What it did was prepare us for the bands that would build on it in the 80s (Iron Maiden, Venom, King Diamond). And let's not forget that Judas Priest dropped a pretty great album in 2018, 40 years after this one.

Some people prefer their earlier stuff, some people prefer their later stuff. The important thing is that that's twice the people listening to them!!!!

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