Black Sabbath Album "13" due in June

[binnie]

Maybe they made better decisions during their drug years.....

[ELVIS]

Shuddup and finish your review...

I'm not buyin' 'till I read your bullshit...

[binnie]

Review will be done by the close of Sunday. I want to spin it a few more times....

[Mr. Vengeance]

How'd the album come out on youtube? Leaked?

[sonrisa salvaje]

I still ain't listening to this until i get an actual copy in my hands and can jam the cd at will. Anything less would be selling it short.

[ELVIS]

[ELVIS]

That song pretty much sucks...

[Satan]

So does the video, considering all the shots in it of Ozzy, Tony, and Bill. But not Geezer.

Guess whoever uploaded that thing can't tell Black Sabbath members apart, and cut the wrong guy out of the pictures.

[ELVIS]

Iommi wearing a wig ??



I hope you're writing some good shit Binnie, because so far I'm not interested...

[ELVIS]

Like Bill Ward would have made these new songs any worse...

[ELVIS]

FULL ALBUM

[ELVIS]

Are They Still Masters of Reality?

The New York Times

The concept of ear fatigue is widely understood, possibly too widely; in an ever-louder world, everyone’s an expert. But those who spend a lot of time in recording studios — engineers, producers, musicians — talk about it with the most knowledge, because ear fatigue prevents them from working. After hearing too much loud music, without enough dynamics, they can’t hear differences in tone and frequency and all sound becomes porridge. They’re tired, done for the day.

I like loud music, and often feel that concerts aren’t loud enough. I also feel that there may be some value judgment or categorical disdain toward the music in question built into anyone’s diagnosis of ear fatigue. In any case, I had never experienced it until recently, when hearing Black Sabbath’s new album, “13.” Or at least that’s what I thought it was.

Out next week on Vertigo, “13” invokes the past. It is the group’s first album of new songs with most of its original lineup since 1978: the singer Ozzy Osbourne, the guitarist Tony Iommi and the bassist Geezer Butler. (The drummer Bill Ward was not involved in the album or the group’s forthcoming tour, because of contract disputes.) So here is three-quarters, at least, of the band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1968, which directly produced or influenced much that followed in hard rock, metal and punk: Pantera, Metallica, Soundgarden, Black Flag, Earth, Celtic Frost, the Melvins, Sleep and many, many doom-metal bands, some of which have named themselves after Black Sabbath songs.

Black Sabbath — let’s speak in the past tense — was a basic formula, a disposition in general. That’s what has persisted through time. But it was also a set of songs in particular, which were much leaner and stronger than those on “13.”

Unsurprisingly, the group’s new publicity photos show only the three original musicians, and not the album’s replacement drummer, Brad Wilk, of Rage Against the Machine, who is 20 years younger than Mr. Ward. But on the home page of the band’s Web site, Mr. Ward has been cropped out of old black-and-white band photos, as if he were never there. (According to an official band statement, the cropping was at Mr. Ward’s request. Aside from all that, there have been other dramas around “13”: Mr. Iommi’s cancerous lymphoma, first made public at the beginning of 2012; and Mr. Osbourne’s relapse into drugs and drinking during the period of making the album and after, which he revealed in a Facebook post in April.

I heard the album in the presence of a publicist in April when it was not yet being entrusted to journalists and found my concentration slacken after the well-constructed, episodic first track, “End of the Beginning.” But I did not judge. There is no percentage in listening to doom metal in a conference room.

My struggles continued, later, when I listened to “13” at home. I’d hear a song, or sometimes half of one, and I’d grow acutely sleepy. Still, no basis for criticism. The ideal early-style Sabbath, slow and low, loud and long and morbidly skeptical, is theoretically meant to pull you under. It is almost primordial or of the earth. It wants you to join it there, forever.

The new Black Sabbath album was produced by Rick Rubin, who some believe to be a prime offender in the recent history of highly compressed and loudly mastered music — a major cause of ear fatigue. His work on Metallica’s 2008 album “Death Magnetic” was particularly controversial. But I really liked that record: it sounded like four needy middle-age men sprinting to the end of their lung capacity. Why shouldn’t that be loud, overwhelming, fatiguing? “13” is mastered loudly, too; Mr. Iommi’s guitar tone planes outward, leaving very little space, and the drums stay high and present in the mix. Your ears aren’t given room to breathe.

But, again, I think I’m fine with that. I love the early Sabbath records, and I love doom metal, selectively. So why my burned-out feeling? Could it not be about loudness after all?

“13” is an album of Mr. Osbourne singing in his thin, droning voice over distorted and comfortably dire minor-key riffs, with brief turns into doom-ballad acoustic guitars, as on Sabbath’s canonical first four records. (To overvalue that 1970-73 period is to undervalue the three albums that followed before Mr. Osbourne left the band in 1979. But that’s what the band does: Its recent concerts tend to stick to songs from those early years, with the exception of “Symptom of the Universe,” from the 1975 album “Sabotage.”)

The new record is above all the maintenance of a brand. A few tracks begin with spooky laughter, a backward-running shard of sound or a few seconds of studio rustling, as they sometimes did on the early records. And then come the riffs. Mr. Iommi’s genius is for short, disquieting, repeated melodic lines played on the lower strings of the guitar. They’re anchors for each section of the songs, and on “13” you might well feel you’ve heard them before.

But that feeling doesn’t necessarily translate into pleasure, as when what seems inevitable also seems fresh. Rather, there’s a sense of encountering incomplete or stock-level work: perhaps a discarded germ for something that long ago became something better, or a kind of paler approximation of an early Sabbath riff, good enough for the job at hand. (“I have a habit of keeping my riffs,” Mr. Iommi wrote in his 2011 book “Iron Man.” “I’ve got thousands of them.”) The same goes for Mr. Iommi’s solos, of which there’s generally one in each song: they’re strings of licks set through wah-wah and phase effects, a set of blues-rock guitar lessons circa 1970. It’s rich, glib music, heavy with its own importance.

The album has eight songs, in two general sizes: five between seven and nine minutes long, and three between four and five minutes long. It has a limited range of rhythm: variations of slow and midtempo four-four, and shuffle grooves. You may find yourself missing Mr. Ward keenly. He has the slight swing and awkwardness that came with English rock drummers of his generation, and this group built its sound around his. Mr. Wilk’s playing is stronger across the board, less eruptive and detailed — and more anonymous.

The lyrics are mostly written by Mr. Butler, as was the case with the old Black Sabbath records, and they’re very early-’70s, full of rhetorical riddles and other-dimensional or dystopian babble meant to put you on edge, like:

Is this the end of the beginning

or the beginning of the end?

Losing control or are you winning?

Is your life real or just pretend?

They deal with crises of faith and morality; they consider the conscience of the lonely or the depressed or the evil, and hint at redemption through rational logic. They’re passé, overwritten and funny, perhaps, without meaning to be.

The phrase “regeneration of your cybersonic soul” appears in “End of the Beginning,” as does the warning “you don’t have to be a robot ghost/occupied inside a human host.” (The album’s cosmic ballad, mentioning black holes and “strings of theory,” is called “Zeitgeist.”) “Dear Father,” the second-strongest track, is a stern rebuke to a sinning cleric. And “God Is Dead?” in particular, may prod you with its title. But the song seems first sensational and then diplomatic; it ends with the line “I don’t believe that God is dead.”

There was often an insane party somewhere behind the negativity of the early Sabbath records. There is no party in here.

I don’t think the loudness is the problem. Finally, it’s the sameness of the songs on “13,” even as they seek variety through modular structure and serial riffs, that deflates the record and the listener. There’s a kind of expensive, well-appointed, historically correct dullness going on here — a display of authenticity without much fight.

[ELVIS]

That's pretty much it for me...

Fuck this bummer of an album...

[atomicpnk47]

What the fuck did Ozzy say? From what i'm hearing i'm not all that impressed. I'll probably end up downloading a song or two but not purchasing the whole album.

[ELVIS]

What the fuck did Ozzy say?

Who knows or cares at this point...

He's a fucking waste case again...