Judas Priest: Demolition : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

It's such a great story, they've made a Mark Wahlberg movie out of it - ultra-fan and cover-band singer gets opportunity to sing lead for his idols. For Ohioan metalhead Ripper Owens, that dream came true; Owens stepped up for the British hard-rock legends full of enthusiasm and vigor, and the Priest of 1997's Jugulator was a re-energized and, praise Satan, an unevolved one. Demolition, produced by monster guitarist Glenn Tipton, has a clean and direct sound, all red meat and bare arms, sinister choruses, chugging pace and those hysterical lake-of-fire vocal harmonies emblematic of vintage metal. Owens is four years better - he slides from talk-singing on "Hell Is Home" to blood-chilling high notes; his solid wail activates the loamy, chunking pace of "Cyberface." His default mode is a bouncy, enormous bellow, slinking into the music's bare spaces like stage fog. Tipton and K.K. Downing provide intelligent, pertinent solos, and drummer Scott Travis only seems to play faster as he ages. If there's such a thing as unpretentious titanic, blood-of-the-goat-style metal, Judas Priest are still making it.