Produced by Ian Gillan of Deep Purple, Jerusalem's sole, self-titled album is the kind of sub-Purple early metal you might expect from apprentices. It's still on the dividing line between early-'70s hard rock and more headbanging metal, perhaps. But it's still got that cock-in-my-pocket posturing, wedded to dark riffs and strained upper-register shout-singing. Even with the limitations of the genre, it's substandard stuff, performed crudely (particularly on the drums) and with a shortage of memorable songs or even licks. It eases up just a couple of times to get into slightly more folk-psych-influenced passages, particularly on "Primitive Man," but these soon get ploughed out of the way for the more customary nut-crunching. You wonder if a young Meat Loaf, however, took one of his ideas from one of the song titles, "She Came Like a Bat from Hell" (one of the more headbangy numbers, as it happens). It's something of a bummer to sit all the way through, and is only recommended to Deep Purple completists, though even Deep Purple fans can find more interesting derivative stuff than this.
© Richie Unterberger /TiVo