Artist: Judas Priest
Label: Sony BMG
Release: 2008
Length: 102:23
Rating: 4/5
Even though Judas Priest cancelled the “Balkan” leg of this year’s tour because of Glenn Tipton’s inflamed appendix, we’ve now finally gotten the release of their first concept album on home turf too. The double disc revives the memory of the well-known 16th-century prophet, whose visions, unlike the many trends of the time tied to the Reformation, didn’t rest on criticism of the Roman Church, which is why Michel de Nostredame managed to avoid the stake. So we’re dealing with a Renaissance world of apocalyptic prophecies, astrology and biblical visions, a theme that’s perfectly suited (maybe even too obvious and predictable) for an obscure metal album. Of course, it needs to be said right away that the record isn’t based on Nostradamus’s writings and doesn’t offer any new readings of his famous visions, since the Priest guys don’t get into interpreting specific predictions, but build their poetics mostly on the life story of the famous prophet.
With Nostradamus, Judas Priest return to the scene in triumph, and you could say this piece of work is a monumental and somewhat more sensitive follow-up to Painkiller (the two records with Ripper Owens don’t count, for obvious reasons, and “Angel of Retribution” proved to be rather weak and uninventive). It’s a rather gloomy rock opera, with which the band peeks toward entirely new horizons, where strings, acoustic guitars and classical pianos resound. They’re not the main subject of the record, though, but are set up as an effective counterpoint to the guitars of Tipton and Downing. If on albums like “Turbo” and, to a somewhat lesser extent, “Ram it Down” the Priest were only just getting acquainted with guitar “synthesizers”, now they upgrade those appropriately with the aforementioned classical instrumentation, which you can hear mostly in the intros before the individual chapters.
The first of these, titled Prophecy, opens the album in the best possible way and, with nostalgic riffs, recalls the brilliant legacy of the eighties, while in the second, called Revelations, the record reaches its first peak. Besides a rather unusual flamenco guitar, the song surprises us with virtuoso guitar elements known as “arpeggio” or “sweep picking”. Tipton and Downing had already flirted with similar daredevil stunts on “Painkiller”, but now they’ve solidified and deepened that skill and knocked on the doors of the pantheon of the greatest guitarists with every right to. In the chorus of the fourth chapter, Pestilence and Plague, Halford struggles through verses in Italian that get pretty annoying somewhere toward the middle of the song, but the track is saved by an interesting harmonic structure and an epic mood. That’s continued by the slow, ominous Death, which, after the (already fifth) intro, morphs into the heroic Conquest and then into the calmer Lost Love, which probably refers to the death of Nostradamus’s wife and children. The chapter titled Persecution is surprising mainly from a lyrical and thematic standpoint, since it’s well known that the prophet was never persecuted by the Inquisition and that his writings were never put on the Vatican’s “Index librorum prohibitorum”. Quite the opposite. As historical sources attest, Nostradamus was a devout Catholic who didn’t meddle in the doctrine of the Catholic Church or in the corrupt habits of the papal court of the time. But Halford and company aren’t historians, so this slip can be forgiven with a clear conscience. “Licentia poetica”, after all.
The start of the second disc is still the weakest part of this mighty release. Exiled and Alone are too soul-crushing and drawn out to grab much attention, and only with the song Visions, which is a bit reminiscent of the fantastic Blood Red Skies, can the listener happily prick up their ears again. After the overly exalted New Beginnings, in which you surprisingly find quite a few Floyd-ish elements (e.g. the moody piano lines and the guitar solo with endless “delay”, plus an ending that’s completely like the closing chords of Any Colour You Like from “Dark Side of the Moon”), the second climax follows. First the relentless Nostradamus, marked by one of Halford’s most chilling screams and a dry solo in the style of Jeff Hanneman, and then the “Sabbath-like” Future of Mankind (in all likelihood the best track on the album), which properly closes out this excellent symphonic metal masterpiece.
Like most concept albums, “Nostradamus” is a somewhat more demanding piece of musical reading, one you have to listen to with full attention to really enjoy. The only downside of the release is the large number of intros (a whole nine), which make it lose a lot of its drive and make it seem lukewarm and a bit lost at times, which is pretty unusual for the Priest. A similar melancholic and decidedly too-strong sedative awaits the listener mostly on the second disc, which only gets off the ground toward the end. But given the sheer length of the album (more than 100 minutes), you can’t expect nonstop guitar bombardment and terror like we’re used to from “Painkiller”. One trait of the record is also that it contains no market-oriented hits like the ones you find on some of its predecessors, since from start to finish it’s laid out as one epic whole, in which every song has its precisely defined place. So it’s a complete novelty, both musically and in content, in the band’s output, but unlike the curious experimenting on the albums “Point of Entry” or “Turbo”, which were buried by an avalanche of bad reviews, it’s mature and well thought out.
So Nostradamus is different, but in a good way, since to a considerable extent it keeps the traditional sound and the You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ “vibe”, just in a more modern outfit, which you really couldn’t accuse of bowing too much to trends. It’s the Priest-style answer to “Operation: Mindcrime” and “The Wall”, and only time will tell whether “Nostradamus” manages to stand side by side with those legendary works and earn a place in music history too. After the first listen, the whole thing sounds extremely promising, and if the Judases fail, it’ll be mainly because of the worn-out, fairly unoriginal and awkwardly conceived thematic foundation, and by no means because of the music.
Lineup
Rob Halford – vocals
Glenn Tipton – guitar
K.K. Downing – guitar
Ian Hill – bass
Scott Travis – drums
Production
Glenn Tipton & K.K. Downing
Tracklist
CD 1.:
01. Dawn of Creation
02. Prophecy
03. Awakening
04. Revelations
05. The Four Horsemen
06. War
07. Sands of Time
08. Pestilence And Plague
09. Death
10. Peace
11. Conquest
12. Lost Love
13. Persecution
CD 2.:
01. Solitude
02. Exiled
03. Alone
04. Shadows In the Flame
05. Visions
06. Hope
07. New Beginnings
08. Calm Before the Storm
09. Nostradamus
10. Future Of Mankind
Album length: 102.46
