Judas Priest
Rocka Rolla

THE REVIEW

We are in the year 1969, and the formidable trio of Rock (Black Sabbath - Deep Purple - Led Zeppelin) is ready to produce its first masterpieces. While "Led Zeppelin I" is about to be released, in Birmingham (UK), the people (better, musicians, because that's what they are) who will invent Metal are beginning to take their first small steps. Kenneth Downing Jr (1951), guitarist, and Ian Frank Hill (1951), former double bassist, decide to form a band. They are joined by drummer John Ellis and singer Al Atkins, who borrows from a Bob Dylan song the name that will become legend.

Up to this point, everything seems normal: the band, just born, begins to write material and appears destined to play very ordinary Hard Rock, inspired in part by the dark Black Sabbath and on the other by the roaring Deep Purple and also by the bluesy matrix of Cream. Instead, 1973 changes everything. In the formation Judas Priest enters the one who will become the "voice" of Metal, the twenty-two-year-old Robert John Arthur Halford (at the time with long blonde hair and the typical seventies rocker look), the heavenly voice, the voice that reaches very high peaks, before fading away in the sky. A year passes, and everything is completed with the addition of the second guitar player Glenn Raymond Tipton (1948) and the replacement of John Ellis with Alan Moore. For the final turning point, we will have to wait until 1976, but 1974 gives us this decent Hard Rock album, which feels so familiar (saying it today is obvious, but even at the time, everything had already been done, played, and written by others), and tries, without succeeding, to show something new, that spark that will decisively mark the history of Rock and burn everything and everyone two years later.

To say that "Rocka Rolla" is bad doesn't make much sense, it is unripe and not very surprising, but in the few insights, it shows a compositional genius with few equals for the time and later (in the field of Classic Heavy Metal) without rivals, able to hold its own against the spectacular trio Halford-Tipton-Downing, but that is another story, still very distant at that moment. It should be noted that the compositional genius previously examined does not openly concern the album in question, but in the unripe riffs and bluesy guitar solos, as well as in the sharp and splendid singing, hides the class of musicians who will change the history of rock music and beyond.

Halford's voice cannot be confined solely to a strictly rock or metal context, so much is the appeal and class concentrated in the singer's tone. Classic Judas songs are difficult to find in this old and dusty album, but at least small gems shine with their own light, such as the ride "Diamonds And Rust" (included in the remastered occasion), with its simple and engaging riffs, the simultaneously rough and divine voice, the long journey of "Run To The Mill", slow pacing, with Tipton and Downing playing Clapton and Page, Hill on top, an ending reminiscent of King Crimson (and not only in this piece is some progressive reference present). "One For The Road" is Rock as it was played at the time, it is the essence of what Rock was, and it is what we should still learn from today. In its monotony, a sincere piece, with a chorus that seems to say these are the seventies.

The "title-track" is the most banal song and at the same time the most engaging of the whole album, a concentration of musical immaturity that makes you smile and enjoys showing the desire to express themselves of a young band destined for great things.

Rating: 6.5