Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Judas Priest
Label: Snapper Records
Released: 1976
Length: 39:12
Rating: 3.5/5
The debut ‘Rocka Rolla’ (1974) flopped when it came to breaking the band in the media. Judas Priest only got a few noteworthy lines in the press after playing Reading Festival in the summer of 1975. Emboldened, they went back into the studio with Jeffrey Calvert and Max West to record a new album called ‘Sad Wings Of Destiny’. On drums, the band swapped John Hinch out for Alan Moore again. With ‘Sad Wings Of Destiny’ Judas Priest get a whole lot grittier, getting louder and much faster than on their debut. It’s striking how many genre patterns this album carries that would become trademarks of the later N.W.O.B.H.M. Alongside the legacy of Black Sabbath in the seventies and heavy rock bands a la Budgie and Montrose, ‘Sad Wings Of Destiny’ is an enormously important record that landed on the scene, and Judas Priest are one of those bands who paved the way for the bands that followed, the later driving force of the movement known as the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.
Two years after the debut, Priest handed the public much, much more music, but interestingly, even with ‘Sad Wings Of Destiny’ the band still failed to win over the media, and this album somehow didn’t get any special recognition from the crowd at the time either. The main blame lay with the label Gull Records, which was too small and too weak to ‘push’ the album onto the market prominently enough against the heavy competition in the music industry, and people simply didn’t know about the album, or even that a band called Judas Priest existed. Things went so far downhill that some of the band members had to take temporary jobs again just to make ends meet.
But when fans discovered this album in the years that followed, it became hugely treasured by hard rock and heavy metal devotees, in fact indispensable. The reasons are fairly self-evident, since the album contains the very thing that’s indispensable on all the Judas Priest albums to come, and that the guys kept building on with real commitment. Riffs! From start to finish the record is driven along in a high, scorching heavy rock stance, except of course for the Queen-flavored Prelude, a very tasteful intro to Tyrant. Simple, witty, bold and energetic heavy riffing. The foundations had gone hard, and Halford’s unique, more confident wailing marks the whole record now. Priest also dropped the meditative, flower-power seventies interludes that are all over the debut, and at the same time moved far away from the elements of blues.
An interesting feeling that always comes over me when I listen to the opener Victim Of Changes is that it sounds like a continuation of the debut ‘Rocka Rolla’. A more intricately built track running a little over seven minutes, it’s somehow not what a lover of the hard stuff would expect from an opening song. The song features Rob’s impressive, extremely high lines in the middle section. They blend beautifully into the song, and with them Rob brilliantly steers it to an excellent finish of towering atmosphere. Then with The Ripper the record gets the proper run-up it needs. In The Ripper, Rob makes it clear that besides conventional singing, he feels right at home in the high lines especially, and what’s more, that’s exactly where Rob Halford is at his strongest. A punchy masterclass of a riff, outstanding melodic screaming from Halford. The line ‘You’re in for surprise, you’re in for a shock!’ means just one thing. Judas Priest came to raise hell. And not for nothing. The song is built to hit hard, straight for a hit, or to put it plainly, Priest came to do ‘business’. The song is formatted in its riff-driven punch and structure like a proper metal ABC. In fact the whole song radiates incredible energy, power, will, the unstoppable character of a band that came to take what’s theirs.
Dream Deciever, with an acoustic guitar that for a moment almost slips off into Spanish flamenco, is an absolute upgrade of Run Of The Mill from the debut. Dream Deciever has the same double face as Run Of The Mill, but the riffy punch on one side and the acoustic opening on the other are fused together with better taste, and the song is graced by Rob’s singing, which sounds incredibly determined. Of all the tracks, it’s surely the most ‘seventies’. But that’s not all. The band pours oil on the fire with the next one, Deciever, a real smasher. The atmosphere and dynamics of the record keep surging at a high level. The instrumental Prelude is a great intro to Tyrant as a composition, and at the same time Priest use it to rein in the horses. Tyrant and Genocide are moments full of punchy riffing, the simple kind that makes your blood boil the second you hear it, with tasty interplay of motifs and shared solo spots from Glenn and K.K., who made remarkable progress in the two years since the debut at what they still breathe in sync today. In Tyrant, the left and right guitars deliver equal, joint riffing. On top of the basic riff, they artfully laid a complex three-part melodic harmony that conjures up a completely new mood. A trick that was no longer new, but a typical pattern the new wavers would later use en masse.
Genocide is perhaps a shade grittier as a follow-up, mainly because the song has no melodic passages like the ones Tyrant is so nicely wrapped in, and so the riffing keeps a touch more aggression. There’s no turning back: if ‘Rocka Rolla’ contains plenty of the clichéd rock levers of the seventies, then with Genocide and Tyrant Judas Priest now tip the scales absolutely in favor of heavy rock / metal. A thing that was only just on the verge of becoming a highly prized, sought-after trend. The piano contributed by Glenn Tipton and Rob’s emotional vocals are undoubtedly the center of Epitaph. A great song with a grand atmosphere that serves to lift the contrast of the whole record, while once again showing that Judas Priest were never afraid to experiment. The song really carries an obscure whiff of a ruined land where the sun never shines, where machines and cold male intellect rule. Epitaph flows straight into the red-hot finish of Island Of Domination, a great closing song that once again proves which way Judas Priest were headed.
‘Sad Wings of Destiny’ marks an incredible genre leap from the debut. Grittier, more determined, played with more confidence, you can somehow feel the guys’ hearts starting to beat for a shared goal.
Line-up
Rob Halford – vocals
K.K. Downing – guitar
Glenn Tipton – guitar
Ian Hill – bass guitar
Alan Moore – drums
Production
Jeffrey Calvert & Max West
Tracklist
1. Victim Of Changes
2. The Ripper
3. Dreamer Deceiver
4. Deceiver
5. Prelude
6. Tyrant
7. Genocide
8. Epitaph
9. Island Of Domination
Album length: 39:19
