Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Don't get carried away.
I mean, Halford is a f'n freak of nature vocally. (Great interview somewhere with producer Andy Sneap about what a pleasure he was to work with in the studio & how he proved that Halford is still capable of doing the same things vocally he did decades ago).
That said however, Metallica's last album was a fine effort in its own right, nothing there to throw rocks at. Only one album released in 2016 came all that close to it in terms of quality (Stuck Mojo "Here Come The Infidels") & nothing touched it in terms of depth.
|
I'm with you on the recent Metallica offering and it is nice to see them regain their form to a degree. I was more speaking to their career arc just prior to it. While I don't think their recent stuff was quite as much a return to form as it is an example of how lacking the genre is when it comes to the classic thrash metal sound, they did do pretty damn good and seem to have recovered from their misguided attempts at being something they were not.
I think this Priest album is classically them to a T but it feels so fresh simply because it is so well executed. That and Metallica's recent effort are only a couple examples that have really cemented the idea for me that execution and consistency are more important to good albums than innovation and experimentation. Not many bands can shape shift successfully. I'm so starved for good music in the genre that I kind of became a Judas Priest fan off this effort.
I think of Ghost in a similar way. They weren't doing anything groundbreaking musically or vocally with Meliora, but they just wrote a bunch of consistently good Blue Oyster Cult type songs with a dark theme and that's what made the album stand out.
Conversely, the recent Queens of the Stone Age album is an example of a misstep to me. It is an album I want to like, and I think the songs on it have more potential than the production allowed them to achieve, but they really fucked up the quality by working with a pop producer in my opinion.