Unleashed In the East (Live)

iTunes Review

Judas Priest had been steadily gaining ground as one of the leading practitioners of 1970’s heavy metal, and as was the tradition in those days a live album was the surest way to establish market dominance: a live album screamed you had arrived. While each studio album to this point had its charm and showed a growing evolution within the group as a tighter, more concise unit, none captured the group’s infernal live energy. In later years, singer Rob Halford admitted to dubbing his vocals due to a poor sound mix, but the band’s two-guitar firepower is left raw and untouched. Definitive Priest tracks such as “Sinner,” “The Ripper,” “Victim of Changes” and their two career-defining covers — Joan Baez’s (!) “Diamonds and Rust” and the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac’s “Green Manalishi (with the Two-Pronged Crown)” — never sounded this loose and free in the studio. The band learned something from this experience. Why else would their next album, British Steel, be their first to capture this wilder side of the band in the studio? The expanded edition adds four tracks, including the band’s at-the-time newest classic “Hell Bent for Leather.”