It’s not hard to be suspicious of Montreal retro-metal quartet Priestess. The band’s take on fast-growl stoner-boogie never gets beyond 1978, and everything about Hello Master, its debut album, screams pastiche. When so many metal bands are pursuing weird new avenues and hunches or taking their elemental blastbeat roars way beyond logical extremes, it’s vaguely disheartening to see a band so tied to old-school formalism getting that RCA money. But not too many metal bands write hooks the way Priestess do. The first time you hear one of these things, it’s glorious; the band’s pedestrian 7-11 parking-lot choogle all of a sudden soaring up and out into triumphant euphoria. When that’s happening, little things like originality don’t matter much.
Still, it couldn’t possibly be any easier to play spot-the-influence here; everything on Hello Master can be traced directly from Black Sabbath or Ted Nugent or Motörhead, and all those bands pulled off the same tricks better most of the time. And when the band doesn’t manage to pull off one of those big choruses, as on “Living Like a Dog”, the results are just oppressively shitty and uninspired pieces of snort-stomp riffage. Also, the choruses wouldn’t sound so great if the band’s verses weren’t so consistently workmanlike and inconsequential, Mikey Heppner’s strained howl gurgling frantically while the guitars chug away underneath him, everyone just gathering their energy for the big moment that’s about to come.
But I can’t argue with a song like “Talk to Her”, a thunderous, elemental blast of old-school rock escapism; it earns every grunt and howl. “Time Will Cut You Down” is another amazing achievement, a power ballad that doesn’t sacrifice one iota of force or grandeur when it slows the tempo down and gives the chorus a little more room to breathe. They make this stuff sound easy.
Comparing Priestess to fellow stoner-metal revivalists the Sword, though, a couple of things become immediately apparent. First, Priestess are a lot more terrestrial than many of their peers. Their lyrics tend to be about girls, not dragons. That anchors their songs in real-world angst, but it doesn’t offer the same ridiculous lift. Also, the band tends to play a lot faster, keeping their guitars stuck on "bar-rock." The Sword’s Age of Winters remains one of the most viscerally satisfying albums of the year in large part because the band knows how to play slow enough to give their riffs a serious punch. If Priestess learned to follow suit, they might have more to offer than their ridiculously great chorus hooks. But then, a ridiculously great chorus hook is usually enough.
