Archive for March, 2008

Black Sabbath - "Black Sabbath"

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by
Pedro Timóteo
8 months ago
in 60s music, Heavy Metal and Rock
. 0 Comments

blacksabbath-blacksabbath And now for the second Black Sabbath album to deserve a post here. This time it’s the very first Sabbath album, released in 1968 (6 years before I was born, incidentally), simply titled "Black Sabbath".

If you are only aware of later Sabbath — even still with Ozzy Osbourne as vocalist, in the 70s, or in their relatively recent reunion tours –, it’s likely that this album will surprise you — even if you already know half the songs, such as "Black Sabbath" or "N.I.B.". And why is that? It’s partly because of they way they’re played here, as opposed to how the same band plays them decades later — here they were raw, full of energy and creativity. Here, they were not famous — it was their first album ever, after all –, so they didn’t have fans not to disappoint. Here, they were not an "institution", they didn’t have an established genre. They were not even "heavy metal", since the genre didn’t exist at the time (indeed, to many, including myself, this is the very first metal album ever). They could do whatever they wanted, write the music they felt like playing.

Think you know Sabbath? Then listen to songs from this album such as "Behind the Wall of Sleep", "The Wizard", and, especially, "Warning" (a cover, but whose original version is long forgotten). The latter deserves special attention — mostly instrumental, at times more blues than metal or rock, lasting more than 10 minutes, it includes some of the best jamming by Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, and best solos by Iommi, ever recorded, in their more than 30-year career. And that was on their first album. It’s a song that you never get tired of listening to, which you can easily show to a non-metal fan and, unless they’re completely obtuse and believe all music should be simple, radio-friendly, and existing just for dancing to in nightclubs. :)

This is where metal began — though they didn’t know it at the time.

Oh, and one curiosity: Ozzy’s voice sounds (to my tastes) much better here than on any of his later albums (both with Sabbath and solo). His voice here is intense, powerful and emotional, without any trace of the "whininess" found (sorry, people) in his later works. Did his voice change for the worse after 1968? Did he choose to sing more nasally and at a higher pitch after this album? Questions, questions… :)

Iced Earth - "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Published
by
Pedro Timóteo
8 months ago
in 90s music and Heavy Metal
. 0 Comments

Yes, there’s still life in this blog. :)

Iced Earth - Something Wicked This Way Comes Going back (I reviewed The Dark Saga before) to one of my favorite metal bands (and one of my favorite bands, period), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1998) was the first Iced Earth album I ever bought, back in 1998. At the time, I knew nothing about IE, but the album cover (by Greg Capullo, the main artist on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comic for years) intrigued me, and at the time I mostly had money to burn, so… why not? :)

Needless to say, I didn’t ever regret it — both for the band in general, and for that very album, the penultimate (excluding live albums, tributes and compilations) with singer Matt Barlow — that is, until the forthcoming Something Wicked pt. 2 (more on that later).

Like most IE albums, SWTWC is a brilliantly written, very emotional album, with an incredible rhythm guitarist and a fantastic singer (let’s admit it, they never had a bad singer except for the first one). Lyrical themes, oweing to Jon Schaffer’s fascination with history and the dark side of religion, include the Inquisition, pedophile priests ("Father in black, black as sin / Pure hypocrisy to no end"), integrity and independence of thought, a dedication to a friend of Schaffer’s who died in an accident, and a heartfelt "thank you" to the fans. But the best is yet to come…

… it’s the Something Wicked trilogy at the end of the album. A prelude to the Something Wicked pair of albums (yes, it gets a bit confusing), the three songs at the end are, quite possibly (to me, at least), the best thing Schaffer ever wrote (perhaps along with the Gettysburg trilogy a few albums later). The riffs are fast, brutal, and yet complex and perfectly played, Matt Barlow sounds better than ever, and the songwriting is pure brilliance, with middle eastern influences (more pronouned in the later re-recording in the Overture of the Wicked EP, though I prefer the original versions here). The lyrics themselves tell the beginning of a story lasting 10.000 years, which Schaffer had obviously put a lot of thought into, even at the time (years before the Framing Armageddon - Something Wicked pt. 1 album).

If you like epic, dark, emotional metal at all, buy this. Really. It’s Iced Earth at their best (while I still love the more recent albums, and I intend to review them here in the future, I think that the songwriting has lost some complexity and intensity, which this album from 10 years ago had in spades.)

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal