Judas Priest and Sebastian Bach concerts in Albany show metal alive and well
As a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I, like many of my peers, was hooked on file sharing (aka illegal downloading) from platforms like Napster and Limewire. At the time, it was a great way to find MP3S of rare tracks and random performances to play on your computer or even burn onto a CD.
One of my favorite finds was a live rendition of the Judas Priest deep cut “Delivering the Goods,” performed by Skid Row and Rob Halford that must have occurred in the early ’90s (yes, I know it’s weird that a teenager in the new millennium was using his idle time to seek out Skid Row/rob Halford bootlegs instead of playing sports or having friends, but like Nikola Tesla and David Bowie, I was a man out of time). It ruled, with then-skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach and thenformer Priest frontman Halford trading off otherworldly shrieks and screeches. You can find this performance on Youtube, and you should definitely check it out.
This week, Albany hosted both iconic metal frontmen with Judas Priest performing at MVP Arena on Tuesday and Sebastian Bach headlining a Wednesday night show at Empire Live. While neither the 72-year-old Halford nor 56-year-old Bach can quite reach the highs of their youth, both still displayed impressive vocal range and pride in their respective performances.
First, let’s talk Judas Priest. Playing to an audience of around 4,000-5,000 fired-up fans, the band played a set that ran just short of two hours and touched on essentially all eras of their career, from the seminal 1976 LP “Sad Wings of Destiny” to “Invincible Shield,” released this past March. Hits “Breakin’ the Law” and “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” felt somewhat perfunctory in nature, with Halford allowing the fans to do most of the singing. But on the deep tracks Halford and the band shone.
New life was breathed into minor singles “Love Bites” and “Turbo Lover.” The arrangements were beefed up and less
indebted to synthy ’80s pop trends, while Halford offered impassioned vocals. “Sinner” and “Victim of Changes” featured Halford theatrically using the lower end of his vocal range and the band offering up Black Sabbath-style doom metal. On “Saints in Hell,” he deployed his classic screaming vocals and sustained them throughout the performance. It was a feat he most thrillingly repeated on the main-set ender “Painkiller,” where the higher end of his range combined with a rapid-fire lyrical delivery and thrash-adjacent heavy metal riffs-and-solos and drumming to create a sonic onslaught.
After the encore’s concluding song “Living After Midnight,” Halford thanked the Albany faithful for their enthusiasm for “screaming heavy metal” and being “defenders of the faith,” then promised the band would return soon.
His comments make for an ideal segue into Bach’s 90minute set at a nearly sold-out Empire Live. About an hour into it, Bach lamented today’s use of backing tracks and synthetic augmentations to a band’s live presentation and after thanking the fans for turning out, said, “You’ve got to still see a real rock show while they still exist.”
To Bach’s credit, he offered a real rock show. His three-piece backing band was sturdy and tight, arguably more so than any he’s had in his 20-plus years as a solo artist. But what was most impressive was Bach himself.
In recent years, his range and ability to sustain notes have been inconsistent. Maybe it’s his new album, the oddly named “The Child Within the Man,” or the fact that his former bandmates in Skid Row were able to get Lizzie Hale of arena rockers Halestorm to step in as their lead singer for a few weeks, but Bach looked and sounded like a singer with a fire lit under him.
Playing most of Skid Row’s eponymous 1989 debut LP and a few from its 1991 “Slave to the Grind” record, a focused Bach nailed the high notes on the ballads “18 and Life” and “I Remember You.” By and large, all the rockers – particularly “Monkey Business,” “The Threat” and “Sweet Little Sister” – were performed confidently and with genuine enthusiasm.
His manchild personality was also on full display, whether that meant throwing an unruly fan out of the show and telling them to buy a shirt at the merch stand on the way out, comparing his eyes and vision to 1970s comedy icon Marty Feldman or busting out an impromptu cover of Frankie Valli’s “December 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” Bach was in good spirits throughout the evening and it came through in his performance, which concluded with a crowd-pleasing take on “Youth Gone Wild.”
Yes, it was a good week for fans of iconic metal vocalists from the ’80s and ’90s, and a reaffirming one. These metal gods can still deliver the goods. Even if, to my chagrin, neither actually played “Delivering the Goods.”