Judas Priest – Point Of Entry

1981 from the British metal gods, Judas Priest have established their trademark riff-based 2-guitar chugging sound over the years. This record has a couple of classic Priest tracks, including some obscure ones that do not fall far from the tree.

Highlights include "Hot Rockin'", Heading Out to the Highway", and "Desert Plains", tunes that remained in the Priest catalog throughout their long career and line up changes. Performance is tight and solos are flashy and technical.

This pressing is great. Big punchy sound, great definition, and super clean vinyl.

3.5 stars. Recommended.

This release has 2 different sleeve illustrations for the lp releases of the various countries. Both were designed by Roslov Szaybo who also designed the covers for The Judas Priest albums 'Killing Machine' and 'British Steel'.

One of the sleeve designs depicts a road entering a landscape and the other apparently a spacecraft entering the atmosphere. The latter was used for the lp releases of Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia and the European release. The South African release, however, shows an upside - down mirror image of this design. This apparently came about when the printer of the SA sleeve used the negative the wrong way around when printing. In the early 80s the images could not be ed from the Internet or sent by e - mail and were sent to printers as photographs or negatives. The design looks much the same as a mirror image as normal and the printer apparently did not notice the difference. It could also have been done on purpose, but that is doubtful. There are thus actually not 2 different versions of the sleeve of this album, but 3.

I have listed the South African version on the Discogs database and the 'wrong' sleeve design can by seen by going to the image which is shown with the listing.