Black Sabbath – “Never Say Die: Live in 1978” (Concert – 1978)
Live at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, June 1978, on the final tour with the original lineup until their reunion in the 1990s…
Black Sabbath – “13” (2013)
The Rolling Stone review of Black Sabbath’s first new album with Ozzy since 1978. This review is from the June 20th issue (out now)…
Return of the Iron Men
After 35 years, Ozzy, Geezer and Tony stomp back and rediscover their stark, bluesy roots.
“We decided to write horror music” is how Ozzy Osbourne describes Black Sabbath’s birth in the great new heavy-metal oral history, Louder Than Hell. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, once again, on 13 – a reunion set with three-quarters of the original band – that revisits, and to an extent recaptures, the crushing, awesomely doomy spectacle of their first few records.
Needless to say, this is kind of a big deal. It’s impossible to imagine heavy metal without Sabbath’s groundwork. And Osbourne hasn’t made a studio record with the band he founded for 35 years, not since he was ousted for being an unreliable alcoholic drug casualty after 1978’s Never Say Die! Moreover, this reunion comes at a time when the evil germ of the evil gene of their sound is deeply resonant: See Southern heavyweights Mastodon and Baroness; experimental metal acts like Liturgy and Boris; and hundreds of other bands around the world that owe a debt to the godfathers of gloom.
13 is steered by superproducer/superfan Rick Rubin, and it shows that, for all their innovations, Sabbath were a product of their era – at core, they’re a blues-rooted prog-rock band, and 13 may surprise some people in its proto-metal traditionalism. The eight-minute opener, “End of the Beginning,” goes through various time shifts, beginning with a sludgy stomp, switching to a galloping midsection and ending with a floaty, almost Beatlesque outro. Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 