In the early 1980s, if your goal was international media domination, being a
punk rock
band would only get you so far, so after toying with
heavy metal
accents on their first two albums,
the Plasmatics
finally dove headfirst into the genre of black leather and big guitar solos with the 1981 EP
Metal Priestess
. While these six tunes simply push the group's music into a direction where they were already headed (as evidenced by the fact two of these tracks are live reworkings of songs from
Beyond the Valley of 1984
), it's impressive how quickly the band picked up the ropes of arena-style
metal
bombast; from the galloping drums and neo-
Van Halen
guitar figures on
"Black Leather Monster"
and the spooky minor key atmospherics of
"Lunacy"
to the cheesy keyboard lines of
"Doom Song,"
take to this stuff like they had been waiting to open for
Black Sabbath
all their lives. While neither
Richie Stotts
or
Wes Beech
were especially imaginative guitarists, they certainly knew the rudiments of their chosen style well enough, and
Wendy O. Williams
' vocals were a striking improvement over her work on
New Hope for the Wretched
; here, her histrionics work in the music's favor, and somewhere down the line she learned how to carry a tune without sacrificing her lung power along the way. One drawback of
' new
direction was that
seems even more cartoony than the band's first two albums, especially more than 25 years on, but if you're looking for some over-the-top headbanging stuff, this disc delivers with more skill than you might expect (and just as little subtlety). ~ Mark Deming