Judas Priest - Killing Machine

Judas Priest - Killing Machine (US - Hell Bent for Leather) - 1978

Released in 1978 this was the 5th album of UK band Judas Priest. This was a follow up of the great "Stained Class" album that was releases only 8 months prior. There was no line up changes since the last album.

Judas Priest were really starting to make a name of themselves and this album added to their growing list of credentials. For me Judas Priest were really the first Heavy Metal bands as we think of them today, while the likes of Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and even Black Sabbath were more predominately hard rock with some Heavy Metal songs. They paved the way for the likes of Judas Priest to forge a new sound that would change music history forever.

The album is very well produce and really paved the way for the more commercial metal of the 80's, including their own albums of that time. All the songs are clearly made for radio play and they have an even balance of high tempo Heavy Metal anthems and ballads. 

From this album they would go on to make the classic "British Steel" 2 years later.

The Band Members of Judas Priest for Killing Machine (October 1978)

• Vocals - Rob Halford
• Guitar - K. K. Downing
• Guitar - Glenn Tipton
• Bass - Ian Hill
• Drums - Les Binks

The album starts off with a straight up Heavy Metal song (Delivering the Goods) that gets you right into the mood for some hard hitting heavy metal typical of this period.

The album is quite evenly balanced between Heavy Metal anthems (Hell Bent for Leather and Take on the World), straight up Heavy Metal (Running Wild and Rock Forever) and ballads (Evening Star and Before the Dawn).

They even do a cover of Fleetwood Mac's - The Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown) which I think they end up improving and making their own. Which is no mean feat when dealing with covers of classic songs.

The album works right from the hard hitting start on your journey through great Heavy Metal music right to the end where the slower and heavy Evil Fantasies rounds off the album quite nicely. Overall the album is well produced and flows nicely, I enjoy pulling this album out anytime that I want a good hit of 70's Heavy Metal.

The one downside for me is that I think a slight rejig of the order of songs would have made a big difference. I think by having Before the Dawn above Killing Machine and leaving the rest as is would have made the pacing better overall. It seemed to me to be a waste having Before the Dawn right before the slower song Evil Fantasies it would have made more sense to break up the middle of the album.

In the end I give this a 9 out of 10 it just had that minor thing that would have pushed it to a 10 for me.

Album Rating - 9/10 

I hope you enjoyed this review, but even more importantly I hope you enjoy the album! I have links below to listen to the tracks and places where I like to buy albums and I have also included links for digital downloads if that's what you prefer. The only thing I ask is that you please buy the album if you enjoyed it.

Run Wild!

Track Listing

(Linked to Last.fm so you can listen to them using Spotify) 

1. Delivering the Goods
2. Rock Forever
3. Evening Star
4. Hell Bent for Leather
5. Take on the World
6. Burnin' Up
7. The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown)
8. Killing Machine
9. Running Wild
10. Before the Dawn
11. Evil Fantasies 

Bonus Tracks

    12. Fight for Your Life (Album Version (Bonus Track))
    13. Riding on the Wind (Live)

General Information

Genre - Heavy Metal

Run Time - 45:51

My Rating - 9/10

Rate Your Music Rating - 7.5/10

Allmusic Rating - 9/10

Purchase from Here

Physical (CD)

                   Amazon                                                                                   CD Universe

 

Digital (MP3)

   Amazon MP3                                              iTunes Store                                      CD Universe MP3                                        

                        

Introduction

Welcome to my new blog! The purpose of this blog is for me to share my love of metal, review the albums I own and hopefully introduce some people to some good music that they haven't heard before.

I have been listening to metal for about 10 years now, I own and have listened to thousands of albums in my time so far. I am in no way a qualified expert, but I think I know a fair bit about the subjects I am writing about. My opinions are mine and I welcome open discussions, I won't tolerate idiocy.

I am a purist and I only buy CD's, I'm not against digital downloads but I am against piracy. The old excuse of not being able to find the CD is crap, if you can search and download albums online, you can search and find albums. I have been doing it since I first started to listen to metal and I have some quite rare albums, it just adds to the joy of listening.

 With each album reviewed I will give a brief history of the album itself, how I came upon it and give it a rating out of 10. For the purposes of this blog I will use the following 8 sub-genres for reference purposes only, I don't want to get into a huge thing about the sub-genres as they become extremely ridiculous. I won't use speed metal as there are 2 conflicting types which won't help my cause.

1. Heavy
2. Doom
3. Death
4. Black
5. Thrash
6. Power
7. Progressive
8. Hair

I will try to provide some links for listening and purchasing purposes. I recommend buying anything you enjoy, it is a way of thanking the artist for creating the work.In the meantime I use RateYourMusic to track my collection and ratings and use Grooveshark to listen to streamed music. I have also started playing around with Last.fm  

I am currently working on ripping my CDs to utilise my own streaming solution using DropBox and another application, hopefully Winamp as that has been my favourite media player for the past 15 years.