As usual, I'm the odd man out, my favourite Priest albums are the ones regularly damned by the faithful: I like the new-wavy
Point Of Entry and the Priest-goes-Billy-Idol
Turbo best. Of the older albums I like
Sin after Sin and
Killing Machine/Hell Bent For Leather (US title) for their sheer variety. Never a huge fan of
Painkiller which was produced by Chris Tsangarides - I preferred Tom Allom's more dry previous productions, perhaps because he is similar to Martin Birch who forged the Deep Purple sound. (When Priest first became known in Germany in the late 70ies, the "Poor man's Deep Purple - they sold the Hammond and bought leather outfits instead!"-allegations came thick and fast.)
I still have to listen to the new album more often to pass judgement. Halford sounds good on it, but the vocal tracks are much more laboriously treated than in the days of yore. He beefs up his voice by adding falsetto tracks in the background where in the past he would have screamed his pure "falsetto" (according to Tom Allom, Halford's high voice is not a falsetto in a singing technique sense). On the first two listens I also noticed "decidedly less Glenn" in the guitar arrangements department. Scott Travis is a great guy and an impeccable heavy metal drummer - as usual, his machine gun bass drum drowns out most of Ian Hill!
I agree that modern heavy metal productions suffer from an extremely compressed and overly massive sound, "the Nickelback syndrome". A little air and space would do those productions good, but I guess prevailing tastes have changed.
"I've never been a Judas Priest fan." That figures, Rob, they are so pleasantly un-Zep!