Released: 1993
Tracks: The Hellion; Electric Eye; Victim of Changes; Painkiller; Eat Me Alive; Devil’s Child; Dissident Aggressor; Delivering the Goods; Exciter; Breaking the Law; Hell Bent for Leather; Blood Red Skies; Metal Gods; Before the Dawn; Turbo Lover; Ram it Down; Metal Meltdown; Screaming for Vengeance; You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’; Beyond the Realms of Death; Solar Angels; Bloodstone; Desert Plains; Wild Nights, Hot & Crazy Days; Heading Out to the Highway; Living After Midnight; A Touch of Evil; The Rage; Night Comes Down; Sinner; Freewheel Burning; Night Crawler
Best track: Painkiller or Hell Bent for Leather
Tracks to skip: I honestly skip lots of tracks; I could condense this down to a single CD.
It’s cleansing time!
(FYI, when I do lots of reviews in a day, check the chronology for 2/28/02 for today’s, I most always do them all in a row. So, for today I just got through listening to the OCR of Phantom of the Opera. That was hell getting through that. I luckily had Priest set up after that one. Not that Judas Priest isn’t plenty cheesy, they are, but at least I can get into this stuff, and The Hellion > Electric Eye is pretty cool.)
I LOVE Painkiller!!! This track rocks so hard. Scott Travis (drums) is the Man on this! Hellion and Electric Eye are cool, and classics, but then comes Victim… and I just don’t get into that one. And then, the MONSTROSITY of Painkiller comes on and destroys the entire world. Man, I love this track. I really love Hell Bent for Leather too, but this might be my favorite. This was the first Priest song I ever heard and it’s always been a big one for me. This is just brutal, awesome, intense, so totally kick ass. Wow. Man, I’m exhausted after that one, and we’re only on track 4 of the first disc!
Some Judas Priest stuff I absolutely love (above paragraph), some I get really bored with. It’s about half and half for this compilation. I rarely listen to all of both discs in a row like I’m doing right now; I usually skip a lot of tracks. If you get this, you’ll get a very good idea of what Priest is about. I always found their albums inconsistent, like Kiss in a lot of ways. You’ll have the 3 or 4 incredible tracks and the rest will be filler. So you can approach starting into Priest one of 2 ways: you can get a single disc compilation which will have only the most famous tracks (and of course misses a lot of good less-famous tracks like The Sentinel and Some Heads Are Gonna Roll) or you can get this double CD and get most of the great Priest tracks (missing the previous two mentioned) with some filler. Yeah, even though they put out this 2-disc retrospective, there are still great tracks that didn’t make it on here.
I don’t listen to this as often as I did when I was younger, but it’s some good stuff to put in on occasion and crank up. If you’re not cheap it’s a good place to start, and in some cases it might be all you need.
Rating: 87
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