Jurassic Priest

Before Painkiller turned Judas Priest into a cyborg war engine firing chrome lightning out its ass, there was a different beast stomping around—prehistoric, swaggering, cosmic: Jurassic Priest. That’s my term for the golden-to-molten era from Rocka Rolla to Ram It Down. You can keep your drum triggers and squeaky-clean solos. I want the molten blues lava, the biker mysticism, the slow-churn occult power. I want leather cracked from real sun, not studio lights.

Sad Wings of Destiny is a sermon delivered from the gallows. Sin After Sin slinks through alleyways with switchblade riffs. Stained Class? That’s android rebellion forged in Sheffield steel—Halford screaming like a fallen angel being microwaved. And Hell Bent for Leather is the punk-rock cousin of chrome worship: fast, filthy, hooked.

Even Point of Entry, the oddball, is like a failed utopia—the sound of a band trying to pull the stars down and getting a handful of gravel instead. Then the ascension: Screaming for Vengeance and Defenders of the Faith. Arena-sized battle cries, every track a warhorse galloping into neon dusk.

And Turbo? Yeah, it’s synthy. Yeah, it’s weird. But it’s the sound of a leather-clad UFO crashing into a cocaine-dusted dance club and demanding tequila and respect.

Ram It Down is the last roar before the extinction blast. It's sloppy, it's overdone—but it's still alive. Then came Painkiller. A masterpiece, sure. But also the end. That was the Priest digitized, weaponized, ripped from the cave and strapped to a missile. Great, but no longer wild.

Jurassic Priest was wild. Carnivorous. Spiritual. The sound of Sabbath getting mugged by a laser-eyed angel in the ruins of an old steel mill. And if you never wept during the guitar duel outro of Beyond the Realms of Death, you might already be dead.

Buzz out.