Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Judas Priest
Label: Columbia Records
Release: 1986
Length: 50:11
Rating: 3/5
Honestly, it’s hard to accept this record at all if you’re weighed down by the name Judas Priest and the albums that came before “Turbo”. But anyone who manages to hop over that hurdle will simply be enchanted. The revolution of magically colorful 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 work synths.
Not even Judas Priest could dodge it, a band that had always surprised with the guts to try the “unknown”. By the sheer amount of musical experimentation it went through in the making, “Turbo” is surely number one in the band’s history! It’s wrong to see this album as a naked commercial move. Personally, I see plain courage in it, and an honest birth of new creative ideas that the guys in the band were pulling out of their heads at the time. Is “Turbo” some interesting early pop/metal hybrid? No, no. The shock at the album’s release was simply so big that the media went completely sensationalist, which kicked up even more dust among fans, and so, sadly, all kinds of miraculous adjectives get slapped on the word “Turbo” for no good reason. “Turbo” really is a chapter of its own, but at its core it’s still 100% heavy metal!
More than that, it’s the way the synths are used that turns most people off this record. They just couldn’t accept, grasp or understand this quality leap. On “Turbo” Judas Priest no longer chopped, sawed and raged raw. They also swapped the black-leather look for leather in brighter colors and started putting on glam makeup, the hair got teased up, and Dave and K.K. even got perms. Apocalypse lyrics were swapped for love poetry. The whole Judas Priest thing reeked unbelievably of glam and pomp!
Even the untypical singles, the “sweet” Turbo and the ultra-light Parental Guidance, released before the “Turbo” album, gave fans a hint that something seriously fishy was brewing. Of course, the metalhead was literally floored, or hit by a heart attack, when in 1986 he came home all pumped up from the shop with the band’s newest vinyl under his arm and jumped in front of his turntable as fast as he could for that first listen, because he was 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! Like a flock of UFOs touching down. Shocking: at the start it’s just Halford and a torpedo of drums, then the Priest slyly, round after round, add multicolored palettes of sounds from the future and build them into their own elements of distorted classics, until in the end we get one perfectly colorful song. Production-wise the album is another upgrade. The drums are even deeper and fuller, the guitars sound totally separated, 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, right at the center of the production, is again expressive in all his glory.
“Turbo” delivers a huge jump in the mood itself, climbing up a notch in the second half of the record. One of the most intense moments of that high is caught in the atmospheric drama Out In The Cold. The guitar synths warn you right away that music technology was plodding behind the musicians’ ideas, and 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 argue convincingly that the synths were used excellently throughout the record. They could undoubtedly be improved on “Turbo”, even by 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 days back in 1986, Iron Maiden flattened all the metal competition with “Somewhere In Time”.
Anyway, back to it. Out In The Cold is otherwise a great track, packed with sadness, longing, despair. The sensual Rob Halford front and center. The song is built the way Priest know how, with a real thrill in the instrumental part. And what a glam sound the drums carry in the production!!! Right after it, Wild Nights, Hot & Crazy Days offers an excellent contrast, because light shines through it, and Rob swaps his calm, sophisticated approach for wild screeching. The other atmospheric peak 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, with the song’s peak once again in a polished instrumental passage. All of it pure feel, always listening to the heart. The closing detonator Reckless keeps the mood high all the way, and you couldn’t wish for a better finish to the record.
The aces 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 their constant experimenting, they built themselves a kind of monument. The production sound on the solos and the soloing style are a real escape to “Ram It Down” (1988). So for them, “Turbo” is just a point on a line of constant positive change.
The first bonus is the wound-up, fast metal frenzy All Fired Up, which has no synthetic makeup on it at all and so pulls even more toward what the band would put to tape two years later. It’s faster than any track officially released on “Turbo”, and it’s odd the band didn’t decide to put it on the record back then. It would have been a great shake-up and given the dynamics a boost on a record dominated by mid-tempo tracks. The second song is a live version of Locked In that sounds like ambience and performance, as if it came from the “Turbo” world tour, on which Priest recorded their second official live album.
Line-up
Rob Halford – vocals
K.K. Downing – guitar
Glenn Tipton – guitar
Ian Hill – bass
Dave Holland – drums
Production
Tom Allom
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 EDITION:
10. All Fired Up
11. Locked In (Live)
