Today’s album is the long awaited Black Sabbath reunion record. When we look at the history of the band I don’t know if there’s ever been a group which such a frustrating approach to reunion. I mean if we’re just talking about the Ozzy line up the band has been in a state of near perpetual reunion and disbandment for close to twenty years. Starting from the one off set on Ozzy’s first retirement tour we have: Geezer working on Ozzmosis, Ozzy guesting on one of the tracks on Tony Iommi’s solo album, the reunion tour (remember when there was going to be an album coming out real soon?) and every other Ozzfest; each punctuated with outbursts of ‘never again’ and legal hassles. In more recent memory there is of course the surprisingly successful reunion with Dio, resulting in the first Black Sabbath (kinda-sorta-but technically not) album since the mostly forgotten Forbidden album in 1995, preceded by more forgotten albums of variable quality.
So there’s a bit riding on this basically. The original line up had something of a sound and chemistry that no one from the band has really been able to recapture since they split in 1978. Even though both Heaven and Hell and Born Again were three quarters the original line-up and the members themselves had their sound still in check there was still an absence of that unmistakable Black Sabbath Sound™.
And if I’m being honest the new tracks from the 1998 reunion were missing that sound as well. And to be even more honest, it’s something which was very much entrenched in the first three albums, kind of there on the next three and gone on the final two. Frankly I’m sceptical they’ve still got it. I have heard the lead single ‘Is God Dead?’ It’s alright. Certainly has the sound that’s been missing since the mid 70’s. A little overlong but not bad. Nice to have Geezer so far forward in the mix and sounding freer than he has in decades.
So how does the rest of the album go? Let’s give it a spin.
The opening track, End of the Beginning sounds like a reader’s digest condensed version of the entire first eight albums. It starts off like a re-write of the song Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath by the band Black Sabbath. Actually if you pay attention to the drums several fills sound like they’re lifted directly from that song.
Which brings me to the drummer. Who is not Bill Ward. Poor guy. Technically I could say that about just about anyone who’s not Bill Ward. I should know, I’m not Bill Ward either and it’s a constant source of frustration in my life. This guy however is in about the most intimidation position imaginable by any of us non-Bill Ward’s and that is the occupation of being a substitute Bill Ward. How does he do? Okay. Better than most other non-Bill Wards. He’s managed to get most of the sound down and while it is obvious at points that Real Bill would have done a better job he makes a good understudy. He is about 70% Bill Ward. Back to the song.
It speeds up (kind of like Black Sabbath from Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath) and then sounds a little more like something off of Paranoid through Volume 4 and then there’s a key change that sounds like something from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath I guess and then there’s a bit which reminds me of Dirty Women from Technical Ecstasy I think. It reminds me of something anyway. Basically what I’m saying is that Black Sabbath most definitely DOES blend.
Okay, so now we’re back on to the single. Amazingly enough I knew what it was just from the opening bars after only hearing it a couple of times more than a month ago. This is a great source of optimism for the staying power of the album. It’s not quite as good as say Iron Man where you hear the riff once and all of a sudden the entire song burns its way into your short term memory forever but by this is much more than I was expecting. It’s starting to grow on me actually.
Loner sounds somewhat familiar. As in I can almost place the riff. It reminds me a lot of Voodoo from Mob Rules actually. There’s a lot of ‘Alright now!’ ‘Come on, yeah!’ and ‘Alright, yeah!’ stuff which… detracts. It fits in perfectly on Fairies Wear Boots because its spontaneous speech applied in a spontaneous sounding manner. Here it’s just weird.
Zeitgeist is a throwback to Planet Caravan and Solitude. Here I think it’s most obvious that everyone’s grown up a bit. Where so far (and I expect for the rest of the album) ‘familiarity’ and remembering good times is a recurrent theme this is the first point where they’ve missed the mark. Again, not a diss on Not-Bill Ward, but I think that to make this song really work as intended the crucial ingredient is real Bill Ward who really knew everyone else’s blues talents, was a bit looser and flourished with the timing of a track like Planet Caravan. The track is kind of necessary to the flow of the album as a whole but it is what it is. Planet Caravan with everything way worse.
Age of Reason is kind of what I secretly feared from a Black Sabbath reunion. Up until the pacing changes it sounds more like a later Ozzy solo song with some old friends lending a hand, which is what Psycho Man and Selling My Soul sounded like. Once the pace changes it sounds like one of the bits from the extended Wicked World set from that slightly bootleggy live album from the early 80’s. I think this echoes what I thought of God is Dead when I first heard it: The faster bit at the end is way better than the rest of the song, yet takes up a minority of the track.
The other filler track is Live Forever, and let’s be honest: it’s not bad filler. It’s better than most of Vol. 4 by a long chalk. And it actually has the needed brevity lacking in a lot of the other tracks, narrowly the second shortest song on the album at 4:47.
Damaged Soul is the highlight of the album for me. The bluesiest Iommi has been since… well the first album. Harmonica! The lyrics, while still pretty average don’t seem to take themselves anywhere near as seriously as they do on the other tracks, relishing in the black and white horror movie tone it presents. Also, credit to the drummer on this track. It’s actually not fair to compare him to the other guy at this point. While there’s obviously a necessary influence Brad does a really superb job in his own right here.
The final track on the album is Dear Father, the topical song on the album. The high mark for topical songs by the band is undoubtedly Children of the Grave. I’m not going to compare the two musically. That would just be cruel. The success lyrically of Children of the Grave is the perfect blend of the bands standard horror movie imagery with powerful protest which is as good today as it was fourty years ago. This one (about the institutionalised abuse of children in the Catholic Church) has a few good lines (“You preyed upon my flesh and the prayed for my soul” is the highlight) but the music itself isn’t a great vehicle for the message. I dig how it folds back on the rain and bell from the first album.
Last up, the bonus tracks. Spread across a deluxe edition and a Best Buy exclusive the four bonus tracks; Methademic, Piece of Mind, Pariah and Naiveté in Black. I feel as though I can speak of these in the broadest terms available to me: I can see why they were left off the album. There are some really good riffs and lines which should have made it on to the album, either as an intro (kind of like Embryo on Master of Reality) or cut the bonus songs to a couple of minutes and trim some time off the overlong tracks. The lyrics are the worst the band has done. Naiveté in Black however is at least as strong as anything else on the album as it stands and should have been on it. The live version of Dirty Women from the Spotify version of the album is pretty dry but it’s a funny choice of track isn’t it?
So that’s the album track by track. So about that question at the start… How is it as a whole? More significantly, how is it as a Black Sabbath album and how is it as a reunion album generally? In order: decent, pretty good and that depends on what you were expecting. This really isn’t a new Sabbath album. This is a vintage Sabbath record and you could synthesize it with about 75% accuracy from The Black Box or a similar collection of the bands recorded output. It’s not a revolutionary record but where I think it excels as a reunion album is that it’s a reunion for the listener as well. It doesn’t build on or change the legacy of the band but I don’t think anyone was expecting the first or really wanted the latter. I would say it’s a success as a reunion record.
To summarise some of my criticisms I feel it is paced a little poorly, if trimmed down to the 40 minute mark along with a lot of the other Sabbath albums (vinyl constraints) it would be the strongest work the band has done since Master of Reality. To be fair, this was a problem on Sabotage, Vol. 4 and a few other albums as well. The lyrics kind of go with the territory, I can’t say I’m really that disappointed in the classical sense of the word but the band has achieved better.
The chemistry is indeed back. As much as I dislike Rick Rubin’s post production style (brickwalling etc. although it’s a little better here) he does reign in his bands to their areas of expertise (example: Johnny Cash). The band supposedly wanted to add a lot more overdubs and multitracking which meant this could have been more of a Sabbath Technically Never Says Bloody Sabotage rather than Black Master of Paranoid Reality Vol. 4 (which sounds like the latest in a series of sci-fi porno thrillers). Brad did alright in the end, although he must have been in an awkward position when it came to listening to the old stuff for ideas and he was the only one scribbling notes furiously. Had I not known in advance I’m not positive I would have noticed.
The big question is… What next? Another tour wouldn’t be bad, would be keen to see Damaged Sould become the new Wicked World or something. Another album? Not sure. I actually quite like the last two Ozzy albums but I think most would agree this is a better conclusion to the legacy than those records. Plus the rain cue at the end of Dear Father is pretty telling that this is a way of closing the band off properly. If it was left here (which there’s every indication that’s what plans to be done) I can’t think of a more fitting album with which to do it.
