A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.John Milton, Paradise Lost
Twenty seconds of drums, one man, nothing else in the room, and the hardest of the three tests this genre runs on everybody is answered before a note is sung.
Cut between January and March 1990 at Miraval Studios in Correns, mixed at Wisseloord in Hilversum, produced by Chris Tsangarides with the band on the first album since 1978 to be made without Tom Allom, the record that finally set two bass drums running under Judas Priest and then wrote a top line no hall on earth could take off the singer was Painkiller.
Which is why the question is Painkiller power metal deserves a better hearing than it usually gets. Nearly every record dragged into this argument passes on the voice and the chorus and fails underneath, where the kick drums are. This one fails the other way round.
An Érard action goes into a piano case, the hammer can be struck again before the key has come back up, and inside a decade every workshop in Europe is cutting the same double escapement, the mechanism now common property, copied, improved, sold cheap. The music written over it is another matter. It comes off the press with repeated notes that flatten the hammer felt, snap strings by the third page and clear the room of every subscriber who bought the instrument on the strength of the advertisement.
Which countries assembled this genre, in what order and off whose records, is the chapter that covers it. One album answers the narrower question, and it answers it in ten songs.
The kick drums arrive, and it is 1990
One change in the personnel bears on the question and it happened behind the kit. The drummer who had held that stool since 1979 worked mainly one pedal, and the credits of Ram It Down, out on 13 May 1988, list him for drums and drum machine together, a detail from K.K. Downing's 2018 book.
The drummer who arrived in 1989 out of a Los Angeles speed metal band and brought a second bass drum with him was Scott Travis, late of Racer X. That is enough to move one of the three tests from a fail to a pass.
"Painkiller" opens the album on drums alone, and Travis has said the figure started as a warm-up he was playing while the engineers were still testing the microphones on his kit. What comes after it is the third test taken at a sprint. Sixteen strokes to the bar under a riff moving in eighths, unbroken across the verse, so even that the ear gives up counting blows and starts hearing a surface. The pattern does not punctuate the guitars. It runs beneath them and never lifts.
"All Guns Blazing" and "Metal Meltdown" hold it there for another eight minutes between them, and the album is unsparing about the device across its whole length. Travis's double kick is what the reviews reached for in 1990 and still reach for, and the pace is why the word thrash keeps turning up in the coverage: the record is filed as heavy metal pushed into speed metal, faster across its ten songs than anything the band had cut before it.
The date is the difficulty. Two bass drums running under a riff were the fixed property of a whole German school by the time this tape was mixed, laid down by Helloween on Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I in 1987 and again on its sequel the following year. The older British records that fed that school had been in circulation since the seventies, which is the ground covered in Accept, Scorpions and the German roots of power metal. No record founds a music that is already three years old and selling.
Nothing on the record is handed to the crowd
Anybody who asks whether Painkiller is power metal and points at the drums has the right instinct and stops one test early. The second question decides most: find the highest note in the song, and in this music it lands on the title words, early, repeated, inside a range five hundred untrained throats can reach.
The title track meets two of those conditions and refuses the one that matters. The word lands on the highest note. The note comes round again and again. The note is a scream, pitched where almost nobody in the hall can follow it, and a crowd that shouts the word is not carrying the tune.
A publisher who prints a part beyond the reach of the people who will buy it engraves an ossia underneath, a second line in small notes, lower, easier, for anyone who cannot get up there. Nothing on this album prints one. Ten songs, no quarter given to anybody who wanted to join in.
Nothing on it was written to be sung back.
The three men who wrote it had spent the previous decade turning out choruses a hall takes off the singer inside one bar, "Breaking the Law" and "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" among them, which makes the refusal here deliberate rather than accidental. "Hell Patrol", "Leather Rebel" and "Metal Meltdown" hang their hooks on a shouted phrase over a riff. The melody is in the guitars, and it stays there.
"Night Crawler" comes nearest to an exception and it gets there by slowing down: a mid-tempo verse, a tune sitting in the middle of the voice where a crowd could meet it, and a chorus that comes home to the chord it left.
"A Touch of Evil", released as a single on 11 March 1991, goes furthest in that direction, keyboards underneath and the tune carried rather than shrieked, and it is the one song here a hall can genuinely sing. Even there the harmony declines the move: the chord chart published for it keeps the chorus in E minor from the first line to the last, the same chord under "in the night" every time it comes round. This genre climbs a dark verse and lands somewhere bright for the last chorus. This one never does.
The voice passes, then takes a file to itself
The first test asks one thing: whether a voice carries the tune in pitches you could write down, clean, the words arriving whole, no distortion anywhere near the hook. The singer who had been setting the ceiling for this instrument since the middle seventies and who spends most of this record above his own working line is Rob Halford, and he passes it while doing everything the auditions of the following decade would hold as anathema.
Rasp, shriek and grit at the top of the range are the method here. He leans on the shrieking head of his range through most of it, and the malevolence the record is remembered for comes out of exactly that choice. The pitches are all present. The tone has had a file taken to its edge, and smoothing that edge off is what four years of lessons are for.
Where the record went afterwards settles the succession better than any argument about tempo. The band that carried the title track eight years later was Death, and the version sits on The Sound of Perseverance, released in 1998 by a Florida band with a rhythm section built for exactly this and a singer who never sings. The pattern under the riff travelled. The song did not.
Is Painkiller power metal, then
No, and the shape of the no is worth keeping. The kick drums pass the test that usually ends these arguments. The voice passes the first test and complicates it on the way through. The chorus, the question that decides, is refused on every song but one, and the harmony never once turns into daylight at the end of a verse. Two out of three would not have been enough. It is not two out of three.
What the album is instead carries no insult in it: speed metal taken to the limit of what this line-up could physically play, heavy metal at full velocity, made by writers who had already supplied several of the parts the genre stands on and had no interest in supplying more. It reached number 26 in Britain and number 26 on the Billboard 200, went gold in the United States, and lost the Grammy for best metal performance, at the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards, to a Queen cover by Metallica, "Stone Cold Crazy".
So the answer is no, and speed has nothing to do with it. This genre writes a song so that a field of people can take it away from the singer by the second chorus, and everything here was built so that nobody could. The drummers who learned most from it were not in Hamburg. They were in Florida, and what they took was the pattern under the riff.
