Artist: Halford
Label: Metal-Is Records
Release: 2000
Duration: 48:37
Rating: 4.5/5
Judas Priest singer Rob Halford’s return to the living with his first real solo studio debut, titled “Ressurection”, owed a lot to the seriously favorable climate on the pan-metal scene of planet Earth, both while the album was being made and when it came out. Old Europe in particular rediscovered, in the second half of the nineties, the forgotten virtues of putting melodic polish front and center in metal. The boom that pushed the until-then-popular thrash metal underground for a decade, with Metallica’s golden era sinking into the sunset, was called power metal. Bands emboldened by Nuclear Blast Records’ pick HammerFall at the helm got serious wind in their sails for reviving the classic old-school elements of heavy metal, and a whole bunch of legendary bands, especially in Germany as well as the US, came back with “come back” albums that could also turn out to be excellent records. So young bands were on the march, bands that also valued clean melodic and explosive vocals and held up singers from classic bands like Dio, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Queensryche… as their role models. A proper springtime revival of the old tradition was underway.
That’s how Rob Halford found fresh momentum for his own awakening, after leaving Judas Priest at the end of the Painkiller tour and leaving no mark worth mentioning in the nineties with his work in projects like Fight and Two.
Two further factors practically begged Rob to take on something like “Ressurection”: Judas Priest fans’ disappointment with the album “Jugulator” (1997), and Judas Priest sticking to their chosen musical direction with singer Ripper Owens. Ten years after “Painkiler” (1990) came out, fans wanted Halofrda back with Judas Priest by any means, but they also wanted, consciously or subconsciously, an album that could at least come close to the uniqueness and inimitability of one of the greatest metal albums of all time, “Painkiller” (1990). “Jugulator” was anything but that, and with its release Judas Priest had already blown their Joker. So it was Rob Halford’s turn to answer.
Emboldened, Halford gathered an extraordinary crew of musicians around him. In the studio he got help not just with production but with writing the material too, from Bruce Dickinson’s guitarist Roy Z, while the song Twist was even written for the album by Bob Halligan Jr., known for his two classic Judas Priest contributions (Take These ) Chains and Some Heads Are Gonna Roll. Renowned producer Bob Marlette, known for his work with Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper, also helped MetalGod write the songs. A motley crew of masters, in other words.
On this album Rob Halford squeezed out the best of what made him immortal in Judas Priest and effectively combined it with a more aggressive take on heavy metal elements, something that wasn’t foreign to him from the Fight days! The result is a great album that in many ways can stand as a continuation of the lost, idyllic Priest story from “Painkiller” onward, even though that was never his intention. It makes up for most of what Judas Priest failed to do, and didn’t want to make sense of, with “Jugulator”. So it’s a kind of Band-Aid for classic Judas Priest nostalgics disappointed with how “Jugulator” turned out.
“Resurrection” is defined by the incredible dynamics of the venomously rolling drumming of former Riot drummer Bobby Jarzombek. Every single one of his hits detonates in the production, alive and cannon-like. In contrast, a massive curtain of riffs hooks onto it from both sides, expertly combined with melodic transitions and soloing. On this album Halford found just the right balance between aggressive riffing and the melodicism he brought from Judas Priest. “Resurrection” is sharp, direct, aggressive, yet melodic, with traditional anthemic melodies that spring from the golden school of Judas Priest.
The opener Resurrection sucks you right in with the winning formula of the songwriting approach described above. And the whole thing is held together by the towering figure of Halford’s vocals. They combine dramatic mid-to-low-range singing with the famous incinerating “screams” that give him a special place in heavy metal.
The album’s opening, then, successfully chases that Painkiller energy. In the riffs, in the soloing, in basically everything, and in the main attraction, Halford’s venomous shrieking, which cuts through the air like a razor’s edge. After the relentless rolling that doesn’t let up even in the follow-up Made In Hell, things settle down a notch with the dark Locked And Loaded, and the album’s first big dramatic moment is thanks to Halford’s mid-range singing in that unmistakable voice. Next comes Night Fall at practically the same tempo, opening much like the classic intro of the Priest classic Sentinel, and the fire in the cold essence of the song flares up in the chorus with melodic, ear-piercing “Halfordisms”.
The mood of the album takes a striking turn with its standout track. That’s the excellent ballad Silent Screams, with a doomed, dramatic essence that effortlessly conjures up the Judas Priest classic Prisoner Of Your Eyes and doesn’t lag behind it one bit in quality, in performance or composition. The sped-up middle section that follows brings the song, in its final form, close to the Priest classic Beyond The Realms Of Death. The album keeps impressing as it goes on, with a textbook example of a song (The One You Love To Hate) where Roy Z, co-writer of most of the best-known solo songs by Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson, undeniably had a hand in things. The opening, with its typical Maiden triple-guitar harmony, makes that clear, and the song’s winning moment is the duet between Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford, which works beautifully as mutual amplification. The album picks up breakneck speed with another seductive, classically built heavy metal song, Cyber World.
After Cyber World, though, the quality of the rest of the album dips a bit. The first less successful thing is the chorus of Slow Down, which somehow smothers an otherwise hugely encouraging opening riff. Twist is, as expected, the album’s biggest stylistic departure. It’s built in classic Halligan style, and its “softer” melodic design could in other times have given birth to another “Defenders Of The Faith” classic, while also not hiding its potential as a hard rock hit (in the hands of a classic hard rock band, of course). Like its predecessor, this song keeps letting the air out of the album’s initial charge. Into Temptation is also in many ways a “lost Defenders Of The Faith” classic, only produced with a nobly lively sound and a higher dose of captured tragic atmosphere. Drive is definitely another less interesting piece of the album, while the closing Savior is conceptually a recap of the song Resurrection, basically its second part.
“Resurrection” is thus an album that can’t boast 100% consistency or equal quality across its songs. But the songs are clearly varied in their basic motifs, which keeps up the incredible dynamics it has. One factor that keeps an album like “Resurrection” interesting through its whole running time is the diverse bunch of writers behind all the material, who managed to squeeze 12 polished heavy metal songs onto one and the same album while shaping the basic ideas.
Suma sumarum, this is an album that holds on to the “Painkiller II.” nickname only insofar as it manages to soothe the disappointment over “Jugulator”. In both style and energy, only the opening title track really comes close to it on “Resurrection”, while otherwise Halford draws inspiration from the earlier period of his time with Judas Priest and artfully crosses it with the venom and aggression of the fashionable outlooks of the metal production craft, which in the end places “Resurrection” among albums of a special kind. This is the album that brought Rob Halford back to the living. After its release the man headed out on a world tour to promote it, which was very successful. Resurrection is an example of an album that, besides Halford’s own basic desire, was catalyzed mainly by the wishes of others, not to say the majority of the metal masses in the second half of the nineties. A very important factor in all this was the excellent musicians and producers who gave Rob support both in the studio and in promoting the album itself. “Resurrection” is the Halford album that can stand alongside the Judas Priest classics in quality, and the only one that can.
Lineup
Rob Halford – vocals
Patrick Lachman – guitar
Mike Chlasciak – guitar
Ray Riendeau – bass
Bobby Jarzombek – drums
Production
Roy Z
Track list
1. Resurection
2. Made in Hell
3. Locked And Loaded
4. Night Fall
5. Silent Screams
6. The One you Love to Hate
7. Cyberworld
8. Slow Down
9. Twist
10. Temptation
11. Drive
12. Saviour
