Can you feel the groove? Doom metal doesn’t have to be heads-down misery all the time so Cathedral dial in some fun on the wonderful Midnight Mountain. Cathedral started their career by ploughing a miserable, glacial-paced furrow but they weren’t the kind of band to let themselves get pigeonholed for long. Their heroes like Sabbath and Pentagram had room for some swagger and boogie so Cathedral did too. Midnight Mountain‘s snake-hipped rhythm, hand claps and Lee Dorrian’s funky exhortations just never get old. And if that sounds a bit too disco for your liking, don’t forget it’s also thunderingly heavy. Check out the quaking riff four minutes into the song. Can you feel your bowels move?
With Black Sabbath calling it a day in 2017, Judas Priest are now one of the oldest metal bands still on the go. They’re one of the genre’s most definitive, influential and original acts. But they’ve also been dogged by consistency problems for decades, making any new release equal parts exciting and fraught. While dodgy production and some weak songwriting hampered 2014’s Redeemer Of Souls it was promising enough to leave me hopeful that better was yet to come. And so it has proved, these old dudes are sounding pretty potent on their latest album Firepower.
The most obvious improvement is the album’s crisp, classic production, but the band’s performance is more assured too: the solos build excitement and Rob Halford is on commanding vocal form. The excellent opening title track and Lightning Strike immediately give this album the edge over its predecessor.
But the songwriting is still not totally consistent. Being more of a fan of melodic Priest like Desert Plains, I prefer the more anthemic tracks like Rising From Ruins and Never The Heroes and find the more hammering Painkiller-type tracks like Necromancer and Flamethrower too clunky. But all the songs have their moments and the varied tempo and style keeps the album engaging. And the band aren’t too long in the tooth to progress either: the doom-laden Children Of The Sun, malevolent Spectre and the raunchy Lone Wolf adding new flavours to the band’s style.
Firepower doesn’t quite have the audacity or vitality to put it in the top tier of the band’s discography but it is their best and most cohesive release in aeons. At a time when many older acts are bowing out or resting on their laurels, Priest’s impressive dedication to forging ahead keeps them at the forefront of the genre. Still metal gods, still defenders of the faith, still delivering the goods.
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