I’ve been very much in doubt what to think of this release; what’s the purpose of publishing more or less raw demos of songs from a 15 years old album? Sure, a very good one, but still…
After parting ways with Judas Priest in the early nineties, because of “musical differences”, Rob Halford brought along with him drummer Scott Travis from the last Priest-album Painkiller, to form a new, more thrashier project: Fight. The band line up was completed by adding some then not very known names, and they began rehearsing numbers for the first Fight album, that Halford started writing on the last J.P. tour. In the beginning this new project was referred to as K5, hence the name above.
The recordings from these early days of the band was supposedly to be reference later in the process of making the debut album “War of Words”. Now Halford has opened his drawers and brought them into the light, along with some tracks that didn’t make it to the album, and released them on his own label “Metal God Entertainment”.
For sure R.H. is sort of a “God” in the vocal area of metal, and this release of the early demos for Fight’s debut, is in some way another proof of this. At the same time, he’s not afraid to show that everything is not perfect from the very beginning. “War of Words” was a very good album at the time, turning true heavy metal in a slightly harder and “street-wise” direction.
If I were to choose between buying this CD or the remixed “original” War of Words album, that has also been released recently, my choice would be in favor of the latter – the extra tracks (marked with * in the tracklist below) on this doesn’t, in my opinion, justify the poorer sound on some of the tracks (even though a lot of bands would be satisfied with the sound of most of them), and the slightly messy impression I’ve got after listening to the CD in whole. Numbers like Into The Pit, Nailed To The Gun and Contortion are still great tracks, and the War Of Words-album should be a part of your collection, if you’re a fan of true heavy metal, but the slight difference in some of the original tracks that made it to the album and the extra tracks included on this release that didn’t, doesn’t really add that much new and exciting to the original, at least not for me.
(Thomas wrote, reviewing the DVD and the remastered version of the original album:
There is one thing that does annoy me, though, and that is when we’re finally allowed into Fight's rehearsal room, we don’t get to hear what the band sounded like when they started working on their material. We can see that they play, and that they probably play the songs we hear – but the songs are dubbed with studio recordings. Buuuh! Hearing the original rehearsal sound bites would have been SO much more interesting.
Well, here it is Thomas...read on below.)
