fever

This has to be in the top 5 favorite songs of mine of Judas Priest, the penultimate track from their magnum opus Screaming For Vengeance. I think that Priest never suffers from a lack of intensity in their tunes, but in this one we have real drama. The opening got me the first time I heard it: a beautiful, clean, chorused-and-reverebed guitar (more or less a rarity with Priest). The reverb gives way to a very dry sounding guitar, the effect of which was explicitly discussed by Wuorinen in the liner notes to his Time's Encomium, viz. that the sound becomes much closer to the listener. Of course we get the drama when the drums and distorted guitars enter. And the climactic point (in E mixolydian more or less) is the pay off vocally as Rob kicks it up into the stratosphere. The tune really does have a feverish quality.