After its success, and the release of a live album “Live Insurrection”, no doubt to contest the live albums that Judas Priest had recently released with Ripper Owens on vocals, it came time to produce a follow up album, in order to maintain that presence that he had regained. And it must have been an interesting period of time in which the band discussed the focus and direction that the new album should take.
Because when you listen to “Crucible”, you notice the differences immediately. It would have been so easy for Halford and his band - Mike Chlasciak and Patrick Lachman on guitar, Ray Riendeau on bass and Bobby Jarzombek on drums – to just write another album exactly like the first one, and ride on that wave to further success. But the sails were set in another direction, one that drew from musical influences from over the past ten years, and combining them on 13 tracks of a short and sharp tasting platter that on its release made it feel awkward to listen to, and difficult to get a handle on.
It’s interesting that most people who have listened to the album as a fan or as a professional, such as a reviewer, consider that this is a heavier album than “Resurrection”. I understand why it is said to be, but I generally think that it is just a different arrangement of songs and the way they are carried that has changed, rather than this being an outright heavier album. The album opens with the instrumental “Park manor” followed by the title track “Crucible”. The next two tracks, “Betrayal” and “One Will”, are infused with great speed, hard core riffs and Halford’s amazing vocals, but are they significantly different from the songs on the previous album? I’d have thought that they sit in exactly the same sort of category as the opening tracks of the previous album. But enough of comparison. This is about this album, and how it sits in the motion of the time.
There certainly is a progression in this album away from the Judas Priest sound to a more Fight sound. The band has taken its training wheels off and thrown the playbook out the window. There is a lot of heavy guitar, great double kick, and Halford layering his vocals over every song to give us that delightful transition between mid range and high range. The musicianship is excellent, as you would expect from the same team that brought you Halford’s first album. And the songs have developed as a result. There is more attitude, and the experimentation is greater, and in many ways I think that it was this that initially threw a lot of fans as to their enjoyment of this album. While those opening two tracks really hammer along and showcase what is great heavy metal, you also have songs such as “Hearts of Darkness” that mix up the tempo, draw themselves up into a nu-metal kind of output, and focus on the basics of that genre, something a lot of Halford fans were less than enamoured with in his band Two. Added to this, songs such as “Golgotha” that gravitate towards an industrial metal sound – and it’s a gravitation not a full capitulation – again something that wasn’t the most popular move of Halford’s fans in the 1990’s.
But there is plenty of attitude in Halford’s vocals on songs like “Handing Out Bullets” where the Solo especially is fantastic, probably the best part of the song. But it is still songs like “Wrath of God”, where the double kick and screaming Halford vocals come in, and “Weaving Sorrow” and “Sun” that are the best of the album. Despite the great concept of trying to extend their range and change up the style of metal that they wanted to produce, it is still the basic concept of the great Judas Priest songs of the 1980’s that still shine brightest here.
In 2010 this album was remixed and remastered, and the order of the songs was revamped quite a bit, as well as having some bonus tracks added to the main track list. The addition of the songs doesn’t overly affect the album – apart from the addition of the ballad “In the Morning” which is really completely unnecessary – but the re-arranging of the tracks does tend to make the album a better listen that the original version. Putting “Crucible” in the middle of the album rather than at the start, and also redacting “park manor” and allowing the album to open with “Betrayal” and “One Will” improves the format of this album incredibly.
When this album came out, it was one I downloaded first to listen to rather than jump out and buy it immediately. As much as I had loved “Resurrection”, it was the age of downloading and it was just a habit to want to listen to the album first before I committed to buying it. And, whether it was the fact that there were a lot of albums out there I was more interested in listening to at that time, or it was the change in style between his previous album and this one, but “Crucible” was not an album that I liked from the start. Indeed, I had quite a few problems with it at the time, and it fell off my rotation pretty quickly. On the odd occasion that it had come on since I hadn’t paid much attention to it either.
Fast forward several years to the present, and when this came up on my podcast list, I felt that it was another of those albums that epitomises what I was trying to achieve with this podcast, by being able to give it a really good second chance to prove to me that it was an album worth owning. So, for three weeks I have had it on rotation, and by force of will, and by concentrating closely on the tracks here, I have found a greater appreciation for it has appeared. I can still hear on some tracks why I abandoned it so quickly at the time, mostly as I was in my European metal phase. But giving this a much better chance to grow on me at this point in my musical appreciation life has helped it immensely. And this really is an album that needs the right place to flourish. Sitting at home in the Metal Cavern and allowing it to pound out at me was where this album was at its best. It needs that volume and bass to feel its best moments.
So I can honestly say that this is an album I now have a greater appreciation of, and that it would probably be a similar feeling for most who, like me, abandoned this quickly at its time of release. What did come from this album was the eventual reformation of Halford with Judas Priest, and the album “Angel of Retribution” that came with it, which has some similar moments on it that this does. Like Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden, the re-joining has seen renewed success for that band over the last two decades. And despite this podcast enabling me to find much more to enjoy from this album than I had initially, it seems that it is still likely to lay in the obscure category for most metal fans, an album that looked to create something different for the Metal God to indulge his amazing vocals on, and it remains an interesting but somewhat flawed result.
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