Description
Pioneering 1978 Record Planted Flag for Speed Metal: Stained Class Is the Last Judas Priest Set to Feature Songwriting By All Five Members
Mastered on Mobile Fidelity's Renowned Mastering System and Pressed at RTI on Numbered 33RPM Vinyl LP: Audiophile Version Is Out of Print
1/2" / 30 IPS analog copy to analog console to lathe
Judas Priest’s namesake razor-blade logo is recognized the world over. So, too, is the band’s leather-and-studs look, the roughness and rebelliousness seamlessly meshing with the group’s no-nonsense music. Both trademarks arrived with 1978’s Stained Class, a benchmark not only for the British quintet but for the international hard-rock community. Boasting cleaner, crisper, and more refined production than its previous efforts, the record became an archetype of the style that ultimately became speed metal.
Mastered on Mobile Fidelity’s world-renowned mastering system this Silver Series numbered-edition LP opens up the sound and spectacle contained within Stained Class like never before. More dynamic than the 2001 CD remasters and more transparent, extended, and immediate than the original vinyl pressings, the reissue brings the metal gods to life. Rob Halford’s piercing falsetto reaches untold heights, and the crunch-and-burn of the dual-guitar interplay boasts realistic weight, balance, and tension.
The last Judas Priest effort to feature songwriting by all five members, Stained Class briefly attained infamous status during the early 1990s after it became the subject of a legal case involving two misguided youths. Yet Priest’s unanimous victory in court further reaffirmed the LP’s purist, no-frills appeal and, moreover, drew attention to the symphonic precision and cleaver-sharp melodies within what Metal Hammer magazine declared “the heaviest heavy metal album of all time.”
At once visceral, complex, aggressive, sinister, and focused, Stained Class addresses topics such as death, victory, and the alien unknown with combustible relentlessness and instinctual passion. While the turbo-thrust gallop of “Exciter” and blaring momentum on “White Heat, Red Hot” rank as straight-ahead shots of adrenaline, the band displays a still-underappreciated lyrical intelligence on “Savages,” the title track, and “Heroes End,” all owing to long-view perspectives and Biblical imagery. And with “Better By You, Better Than Me” and “Beyond the Realms of Death,” Priest cut two songs whose influence on the likes of Metallica, Megadeth, and countless others remains today.
As metal journalist Martin Popoff wrote in his book The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time: “The album was first and foremost a spot of production crumpet proposing that this kind of music could exist and thrive within the realm of armchair audiophile fidelity. This was applied nowhere with more force than within the tom-tom sound of drummer Les Binks, who holds the philosophical line to the briefly sparked Simon Phillips’ version of the band, one record previous.”
1. Exciter
2. White Heat, Red Hot
3. Better By You, Better Than Me
4. Stained Class
5. Invader
6. Saints In Hell
7. Savage
8. Beyond the Realms of Death
9. Heroes End
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