Label: Columbia Records
Release date: April 14, 1986
Production: Tom Allom
Length: 40.58 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7.5/10
Honestly, this record is hard to accept at all if you’re weighed down by the Judas Priest name and the albums that came before “Turbo”. But anyone who manages to hop over that hurdle will simply be enchanted. By then the revolution of magically labeled buttons and blinking lights in synthesizer development was already firmly rooted in commercial music, and pop musicians from Duran Duran to Michael Jackson had become true seasoned masters of the things. Sooner or later the trend swept up metal bands too, and in the mid-eighties metalheads started eagerly learning how to use synths.
Not even Judas Priest could dodge it, and they were always the ones surprising everyone with their courage to try out the “unknown”. For the sheer amount of musical experimentation it went through during its making, “Turbo” is surely number one in the band’s history! It’s a mistake to look at this album as a naked commercial move; personally, I see in it simple courage and the honest birth of new creative ideas that the band members were hauling out in that period. Is “Turbo” some interesting early pop/metal hybrid? No, no. It’s just that the shock at the album’s release was so big that it set off extreme sensationalism in the media, which stirred up even more dust among fans, and that’s why the word “Turbo” unfortunately, and often needlessly, conjures up all sorts of wondrous adjectives. “Turbo” is truly a chapter of its own, but at its core it’s still 100% heavy metal!
More than the way the synths are used, what puts most people off this record is that they simply weren’t able to accept, grasp or understand this quality leap. On “Turbo” Judas Priest no longer lumbered, sawed and raged raw; they also swapped the black-leather image for leather in more colorful shades and started putting on glam makeup, the hair got teased up, and Dave and K.K. even treated themselves to perms. Apocalypse lyrics gave way to love poetry. The whole Judas Priest camp suddenly reeked of glam and pomp!
Even the atypical singles, the “sweet” Turbo and the ultra-light Parental Guidance, released before the album “Turbo”, gave fans a hunch that something seriously suspicious was brewing. Of course, the metalhead was literally floored, or hit by a heart attack, when in 1986 he came home all hyped up from the record shop with the band’s newest vinyl under his arm and hopped to his turntable as fast as he could to give in to the first cursory listen, since he’d been longingly expecting an album wound up as tight as its predecessors “Defenders Of The Faith” and “Screaming For Vengeance”.
The album opens with the title track, and how! With the landing of a flock of UFOs. Shocking: at the start it’s just Halford and a torpedo of drums, then the Priest slyly, round after round, add multicolored palettes of future sounds and build them into their elements of distorted classics, so that in the end we get a perfectly many-colored song. Production-wise the album is an upgrade once again. The drums are deeper and fuller, the guitars completely separated in the mix, and the same goes for the bass. At no point do the instruments “step on each other’s toes”, and they’re all equally expressive. The indispensable Halford at the center of the production is once again expressive in all his glory.
“Turbo” offers an excellent leap in sheer atmosphere, as it climbs a notch higher in the second half of the record. One of the most intense moments of high mood is caught in the atmospheric drama Out In The Cold. The guitar synths tell you right away that music technology was toddling behind the musicians’ ideas, but the sound takes us straight to the mid-eighties. So the intro itself sounds completely bare and alien today, and to a devotee of guitar distortion even tasteless. That’s why it’s very hard to stand firmly behind the claim that the synths were brilliantly used throughout the record; without doubt they could have been improved on “Turbo”, even to the point of leaving them out in places (e.g., in the intro to Out In The Cold). As for perfecting metal records with guitar synths, the trend of those distant days of 1986, Iron Maiden with “Somewhere In Time” flattened every last bit of metal competition.
Anyway, back to it. Out In The Cold is otherwise a superb tune, loaded with sadness, longing, despair. A soulful Rob Halford at the center. The song is built the way Priest know how, with a peak in the instrumental section. And what a glam sound the drums have in the production!!! Wild Nights, Hot & Crazy Days follows as an excellent contrast to it, since light shines through it, and Rob swaps his calm, sophisticated approach for unhinged screeching. Another atmospheric high point next to Out In The Cold is caught in the pre-chorus of Hot For Love, which opens with the line “Nowhere to run,…”, a bomb that gives you goosebumps, and once again the peak of the song lies in a polished instrumental section. All of it pure feel, always listening to the heart. The closing detonator Reckless keeps the whole high mood going, and you couldn’t wish for a better finish to the record.
The highlights of the record are Locked In, with a fantastic crossfire of solos from the guitar duo, and Reckless. The solos already sound right in the spirit of Ram It Down. The two guitarists kept upgrading their playing all along. With all the uniqueness this duo radiates and the constant experimenting, they built themselves a sort of monument. So the production sound in the solos and the soloing style are a real escape to “Ram It Down” (1988). In other words, “Turbo” is for them just a point of constant positive change.
The first bonus track is the wound-up, fast metal bustle of All Fired Up, which has no synthetic makeup and so pulls even more toward what the band would put on tape two years later. It’s a faster track than anything that officially came out on “Turbo”, and it’s really odd that the band decided not to put it on the record back then. It would have been an excellent change of pace and added to the record’s dynamics, where mid-tempo tracks dominate in number. The second song is a live version of Locked In, which sounds in ambience and performance like it’s from the “Turbo” world tour, the one on which Priest recorded their second official live album.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik, 2002
Track list:
1. Turbo Lover
2. Locked In
3. Private Property
4. Parental Guidence
5. Rock You All Around The World
6. Out In The Cold
7. Wild Nights, Hot And Crazy Days
8. Hot For Love
9. Reckless
bonus tracks on the 2002 remastered reissue:
10. All Fired Up
11. Locked In (Live)
Lineup:
Rob Halford – vocals
K.K. Downing – guitar
Glenn Tipton – guitar
Ian Hill – bass
Dave Holland – drums
