Jerusalem

About

Produced by Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, Jerusalem's sole, self-titled album is the kind of sub-Purple early metal you might expect from apprentices. It's still on the dividing line between early-'70s hard rock and more headbanging metal, perhaps. But it's still got that cock-in-my-pocket posturing, wedded to dark riffs and strained upper-register shout-singing. Even with the limitations of the genre, it's substandard stuff, performed crudely (particularly on the drums) and with a shortage of memorable songs or even licks. It eases up just a couple of times to get into slightly more folk-psych-influenced passages, particularly on "Primitive Man," but these soon get ploughed out of the way for the more customary nut-crunching. You wonder if a young Meat Loaf, however, took one of his ideas from one of the song titles, "She Came Like a Bat from Hell" (one of the more headbangy numbers, as it happens). It's something of a bummer to sit all the way through, and is only recommended to Deep Purple completists, though even Deep Purple fans can find more interesting derivative stuff than this.

via Last.fm

The Clerk says

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