everyone, had we lost.
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cated, ambiguous but decidedly apocalyptic lyric, both tracks on the album thus far fitting the stated goal from two records back on Sad Wings, namely “big changes are gonna come.”
Tipton’s riff is a circular classic, and the guitar sound is gorgeous. Priest change it up for a ven-omous double-speed chorus, before settling back into a funky groove the band’s last drummer might have appreciated. Next up is the Spooky Tooth cover, “Better by You, Better than Me,” written by keyboardist Gary Wright.
It dovetails so nicely with the rest of the mate-rial, one might not notice it was a cover. It’s quite riffy, the chorus is aptly grand and “reli-gious” of vibe, like many high-minded Priest moments, and with those gorgeously tuned toms of Binks (much like Peart), the song bears enough of a Priest stamp that it doesn’t disrupt the sequence of events. The track was issued as a single a month before the release of the album (backed with “Invader”) but failed to chart.
The title track is next (countless times in the press, this album was called Stained Glass) and once again, Priest stuff a pert and perky, modern metal rocker with all sorts of “A” riffs,
shifts in tempo, corners and creases. Rob does some of his highest singing, also using some of the sing-songy vocal melodies he had written seemingly effortlessly back in the golden era of the band. “Invader” offers more of the same post–Deep Purple perfection, Priest finding groove and goodly riffing while Rob turns in an amusing lyric on a subject dear to metal hearts, alien invasion. Of note, Glenn has called the quieter noise intro to this track, which features Echoplexes, “a bit timid.”
Opening side two of the original vinyl was
“Saints in Hell,” Rob again using mostly the high end of his prodigious range. Lyrically, this is a colorful one, with all manner of man and beast joining in yet another apocalyptic battle, one that seems to involve good and evil in a religious sense, but also includes beings and creations from science fiction. It is possible — although a bit of a muddle — to see most of the album as part of the same fiery, astral tale, with the slick graphics of the album cover even
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helping to flesh out a vibe Tipton was wont to call “cybernetic.”
“Savage” is next, and it’s a bit of a departure, heavier and darker than the rest of the album, almost Sabbatharian, with Rob writing a classy lyric mourning the white man’s vanquishing of
“savages” and their lands. It’s a smart, poignant lyric, helping to underscore this band and this album as something a few notches above stan-dard heavy metal fare.
Next up was “Beyond the Realms of Death,”
a dark and pure heavy metal “power ballad” of a serious type that would give rise to classics from Metallica like “Fade to Black” and “One.”
“That was the one that got us into trouble,”
recalls Glenn, of the song that brought the band the lawsuit we’ll discuss in greater detail later in our Ram it Down chapter. “That’s what thinking about that album brings back to me immediately, all that hullabaloo and nonsense surrounding it. I had to go to court every day in a suit, because they wouldn’t let us in without a suit. And we had to listen to bare-faced lies. But we were victorious in the end, so in a way we flew the flag for heavy metal.
Because every book, film, article afterwards would have come under fire. It would have been unbearable for everyone, had we lost.”
Adds K.K., speaking more so about the album as a whole, “That was the one with the so-called subliminal messages and the court case, so obviously, I don’t know if the band has grown to distance themselves from that album [laughs]. Well, we wouldn’t musically anyway, because they’re all our babies.”
The song’s mournful, passionate, despon-dent suicide theme would be cited as the fuel for a teenage suicide pact between two Reno, Nevada, fans. One friend died and another was greatly disfigured, dying later of a drug over-dose. Stained Class’s cover art was even called into play, with the bar pattern (some call it a laser beam) seen as the path of a bullet. Strictly speaking, it was “Better by You, Better than Me” that was cited for subliminal messaging — i.e., backmasking — with “Beyond the Realms of Death” collared for its forward message.
Notes Al Atkins: “The big riff in the middle of ‘Beyond the Realms of Death’ sounds very much like a song I wrote called ‘Life Goes On.’
But it was a long time ago and I don’t lose any
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sleep over it.” Indeed, that is one monster of a riff of which Al speaks, a ferociously angry and heavy break in a song that is mostly balladic, although heavy and Sabbath-like come chorus time. Bizarrely, the song is credited to Binks/Halford, reason being that Les had wan-dered into rehearsal one day, picked up a guitar and, being left-handed, turned it upside down, proceeding to write the song’s opening pattern. K.K. has said it’s the one and only time he’d ever seen Binks pick up a guitar, going so far as to say that Les wrote all of it, save for the solos!
“I love that song because whenever I sing it, emotionally, it takes me on a wonderful journey,” reflects Rob on this morose and funereal classic. “I think about a lot of things when I sing that song. Obviously I think about my times with Priest. I also reflect on some of the unfortunate situations that hap-pened with people in rock ’n’ roll, and of course to some extent the fans, people who have difficulties in life and for one reason or another, want to end their life in different ways. But also it’s a song that has a lot of