Sermons of the Sinner

I'd say this album was a disappointment, but my expectations for this album were too low for it to really be disappointing.

The fact that this album was going to be completely creatively bankrupt was pretty obvious before the album even released. The track list alone told me most of what I needed to know. "Hellfire Thunderbolt", "Metal Through and Through", "Brothers of the Road, "Raise Your Fists", "Wild and Free"... That's half the album right there, and without even listening to it, I immediately formed the opinion that the album would lack much of any artistic merit. That assumption was proven to be correct in the first minutes of the album, and it remained true for the rest of it.

Thematically and lyrically, Sermons of the Sinner is pathetic. It just is. Every song on this record is childish, aggressively masculine, generic and boring as all hell. The tone is so intensely bland that the only reason I sat through the entire thing was so I could write this review. That blandness extends into the music itself; it sounds as if the surface level elements of every classic Judas Priest album were thrown together in a blender, and this pointless slop was the result. Every song blends together, each coming and going without leaving much of any real impression besides "that was boring". It honestly doesn’t even compare to Priest’s more recent outputs of Firepower and Redeemer of Souls, which are average at best themselves; much less the classic Priest albums this mess of a record is attempting to imitate.

And that’s what it is: a pale imitation. It can’t offer anything new to the table, it can’t be thematically interesting in the slightest, and it isn’t even good at the little it does. There were no high or low points on this one, just a flat line of samey garbage. Don't bother listening to this one, and definitely don't buy it.

0/100
-Luna