Judas Priest – Jugulator (1997)

February 18, 2024

In season 2 of HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Wire, dock worker and part-time criminal Thomas “Horseface” Pakusa asks his union boss Frank Sobatka the following question: “Let me ask you something important. You like fake tits? Thus far, I am undecided on fake tits.” – Now, I’m not saying that David Simon’s masterwork on the failure that is the war on drugs could or should have been written in any other way, but if I had been tasked with writing dialogue for Horseface, I would have done it a bit differently. Instead of clutching a titty mag in that grotty little office scene, Horseface would be reading a copy of Kerrang! or Metal Hammer or some such bullshit music rag, and instead he would be asking Frank Sobatka this slightly different question: “Let me ask you something important, Frank. You like Jugulator? Thus far, I am undecided on Jugulator.” – In fact, to round out this pointless preamble to my review, I’ll say that you can safely put “Thus far, I am undecided on Jugulator” on my gravestone.

In all seriousness however, I have no idea what to make of this record. Ripper Owens is a formidable replacement for the wayward Halford. The band steps up a bit in heaviness, in an attempt to expand on what they started with Painkiller and to also modernise their sound. The production, seemingly shared between the band and Sean Lynch, is crisp and very well balanced. Why then, does Jugulator feel like a weird side-step into an alternative universe? The lyrics to all of the songs are incredibly goofy. I mean, Halford had some goofy-ass lyrics, but the man made “camp” metal as fuck. Ripper instead seems to wallow in lyrics of teenage quality, but it seems to be the case that other members of the band were filling the lyrical void left by Halford. It may have been better to leave the new vocalist deal with the lyrics. On top of this, we have these very odd samples and intros to various tracks, and like the icing on the bizarre cake is the super fucking zoomed in, pixelated artwork. Like… who the fuck signed off on that?

I have no idea how much crack was being smoked during this era of the band. It is the only explanation that I can concoct that explains the results that we have in front of us. It is easy to see that the band are ashamed of this too, with Ripper’s period in the band more or less being wiped from history and never mentioned again (like any Sabbath line-up after Dio). I mean, it’s not even on Spotify like the entirety of the rest of the band’s catalog.

TLDR – You like Jugulator? Thus far, I am undecided on Jugulator.