R.I.P. OZZY

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Jul 222025
 


photo by Ross Halfin

(written by Islander)

This isn’t an entertainment news site, unless the news concerns the release of a record whose music we’re writing about. But the death of Ozzy Osbourne is an event we can’t overlook.

Many of us grew up listening to Black Sabbath and/or Ozzy‘s solo records. That music became part of the language of our minds, not just what we heard and felt but how we reacted to the world around us, as much a part of our internal “culture” as an external part.

And then, add to that the tens of thousands of other bands whose music Ozzy and his bandmates influenced down to this very day, musicians who took those influences, either directly or indirectly from other bands who had already built upon them, and spun out music into hundreds of new directions they might not have found if Ozzy hadn’t been born. Continue reading »

SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED FOR BLACK SABBATH’S FINAL TOUR

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Sep 032015
 

Black Sabbath-The End tour flyer

 

I’m interrupting the work I’m supposed to be doing for my fucking day job because this seemed like important news:  Black Sabbath have announced that their farewell North American tour, The End, will begin in January in Omaha and end in February at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The band will do a leg in Australia and New Zealand in April and will be announcing more shows next month.

The lineup will consist of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler — but not drummer Bill Ward, of course. Here’s the schedule announced today: Continue reading »

A DEFENSE OF BLACK SABBATH’S “13”

 Album Reviews  13 Responses »
Jan 072014
 

(Guest writer marious has delivered unto us this review and defense of an album with an unlucky title by a band named Black Sabbath. I know I’ve heard that name somewhere…)

Hey all, this post is something of a defense of Black Sabbath’s 13. So, batten down the hatches, because I’m going to rant about some clean singing old guy metal for a little bit. I personally think this album is pretty incredible and a lot of people seem to be refusing to give it a fair chance due to some really negative hype online and their own preconceptions. If you have given the album a full listen or two and still don’t like it, I doubt I will persuade you. I’m not going to appeal to a sense of nostalgia or what not to bring the faithful back to the fold. This is for those people who have yet to hear it, or have only listened to one or two tunes at a glance. So, here goes.

One of the most common complaints I hear is that Ozzy can’t really sing anymore and that the processing on his voice is simply a method of making his singing passable. Honestly, Ozzy was never that great of a singer. His vocal patterns were always relatively simple in Sabbath and his range is not all that wide, but he’ll always be the voice people associate the most with Black Sabbath. However, if you listen to his vocal patterns on 13, they are pretty different from the classic Ozzy-era Sabbath stuff. Generally, he would sing along directly with the rhythm, but he has broken into some more interesting patterns on 13. I’ve heard a bunch of the new tracks live via the interwebs, and while it does sound like his voice is getting a bit strained, it is pretty much the same as it’s always been to me. The vocal processing on 13 doesn’t sound bad or out of place to me, especially since Sabbath had been using effects on Ozzy’s voice well before he was “too old to sing”. Check out Planet Caravan from Paranoid for a bit of evidence. Continue reading »

BLACK SABBATH VOL. 4 TURNS 40

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Aug 312012
 

It’s time to celebrate another metal anniversary. Tomorrow, September 1, 40 years will have passed since the official release of Black Sabbath’s fourth album. Hard to believe: Forty. Fucking. Years.

As I’ve done in the past, I’m stealing from my fellow metal blogger Full Metal Attorney, who is a lot more on the ball watching the calendar for events like this than yours truly. He discusses the significance of this album on his own site today, proclaiming it the pinnacle of Black Sabbath’s career, surpassing each of the band’s first three albums — Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), and Master of Reality (1971).

FMA attributes the album’s excellence mainly to Tommy Iommi’s riffs, especially on “Supernaut”, “Wheels of Confusion”, “Cornucopia”, “Snowblind”, and the song he calls “the heaviest Sabbath song of all”, “Under the Sun”. But he also praises the performances of the rest of Sabbath — Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and of course Ozzy.

As FMA himself acknowledges in the article, lots of people would disagree with him putting Vol. 4 above Paranoid and Master of Reality. He chalks that up to the presence of the weird experimental track “FX,” the relatively long acoustic instrumental “Laguna Sunrise,” and the piano/synth ballad “Changes” — but he asserts that these quirky, imperfect songs are precisely what has made the album so memorable after 40 years, in addition to all of the album’s phenomenal successes. Continue reading »

NEWS FROM ALL OVER: MACHINE HEAD, OZZY, TIGER WOODS

 Metal News, Mosh Pit  No Responses »
Feb 262010
 

This is just a mish-mash of funny shit we saw over the last 24 hours. I had planned to be talking about some new music today, but the demands of my day job kinda screwed over those plans, so there’ll be a slight delay until tomorrow. So yeah, today’s post is more or less filler. Forgive us.

MACHINE HEAD FIRES SAN DIEGO

First up, this kinda bizarre piece of news about Oakland metal band Machine Head (pictured above):

MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn has revealed that his band has “fired” the city of San Diego, and will never play there again. He tells Rock Radio DJ David “The Captain” Grant, “A lot of crowds are awesome. But if we’re playing San Diego, we’re not going to go on the radio and say, ‘San Diego crows are awesome’ — because they’re not. They’re beat. That’s MACHINE HEAD slang for ‘We don’t like them.’ They don’t come to a show and rage and go crazy. They come to a show and say, ‘Okay… this is cool. Oh, I like this song.’ We’re not into that. I don’t know why they come to a rock show with that kind of attitude. So we don’t go to San Diego anymore. They’re fired.”

This is the first time we can remember a band deciding to fire a whole city. Sure, bands have been known to write off a particular venue where they had a shitty experience, or refusing to participate in a particular tour because of bad experiences with a particular promoter.  But giving the finger to an entire city’s worth of fans? Maybe this is a manifestation of that NoCal – SoCal rivalry that’s been around since California became a state. Or maybe there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

But we’re guessing that now, the feeling’s mutual. Maybe some enterprising photographer will figure out a way to arrange a shot of all metal fans in San Diego gathered in a stadium and flipping the bird at Machine Head. (more after the jump, including some embarrassment about Ozzy and some wet-your-pants funny shit about Tiger Woods . . .) Continue reading »