So after Prieboy released his second solo album, Sins of Our Fathers (1995), he kind of disappeared for a while, so far as the casual bystander could see, until he started releasing his own material in 2009. Interesting career path. One thing we knew was that in the late nineties-ish, he created this musical, about an Axl-Rose-esque figure making his way in LA's burgeoning metal scene, but this was very tantalizing, because there was almost no evidence online that it ever existed: a few archived contemporaneous newspaper reviews and a clip of an abridged version of one song as performed by the cast on the Conan O'Brien show (O'Brien had seen and liked it). You sort of think something like this would HAVE to be available somehow somewhere, and the fact that it wasn't made it seem like lost media--and indeed, was, until just this spring Prieboy gave everyone an amazing surprise by releasing a painstakingly cleaned-up and remastered version taken from aging tapes--so now we can all hear what we were missing.
For whatever reason, I didn't get around to actually listening to it a week or so ago. With something like this there' always a certain amount of tension: this is SUCH a long-awaited thing, but what if I don't like it? What a dang let-down that'll be. But HOLY GOD IS THIS GOOD. I must've listened to it, I don't know, a dozen times at this point? And I feel like I want to talk about it in detail.
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