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Black Sabbath: Mob rules

20/07/09 || Smalley

Yeah I know, Sabbath was one of the very first metal bands, they’ve had so much influence on the genre, they recorded so much awesome shit back in the day, yaddayaddayadda I’ve heard it all before. The fact remains, the stuff with Ozzy just doesn’t interest me much; yes, there’s a song here and there that I like (“Sweet leaf”!), but most of the music they made with him just fails to grab me, and doesn’t hold appeal for me in today’s metal world. Plus, Ozzy’s voice almost always kills the metal boner I can get from Iommi’s riff foreplay (just using metaphors here, I’m not a perv!). Fortunately, I feel Sabbath stepped up their game substantially with “Heaven and hell”, a much more entertaining album than anything the band had made prior, a good deal of that due to the much-more tuneful Ronnie James Dio replacing Ozzy on vox. Knowing how good “Heaven” was, I went into “Mob rules” with rather high expectations, and now it’s time to for you to find out if they were met…

There’s nothing wrong with the basic sound of “Turn up the night”, as Iommi’s guitar tone is fine, the bass work sounds nice and fat, Dio does great with his singing (as always), and although Vinny Appice doesn’t quite have the entertaining swagger that Bill Ward did on the drums, his performance is still solid, and suits the album well. The writing is what’s the problem; the riffs Iommi wrote here seem too watered-down and “friendly”, lacking the bite that they once had, and along with the “let’s party!” kind of lyrics and the song’s structure overall, “Turn” sounds way too much like something that’d be on classic rock radio; definitely not cool, and it’s a constant problem on the album to boot. Sure, “Heaven and hell” wasn’t a dark album at all (especially not compared to Ozzy-Sabbath), but at least it had plenty of good songwriting to make up for that.

“Voodoo” is definitely a better song, with sharper riffs and a more metal atmosphere overall, but it still doesn’t reach the potential that I know Sabbath is capable of, and the somewhat doom-y “sign of the southern cross” begins with nice acoustic guitar work, then has Iommi playing the kind of heavy riff he used to write all the time in the old days, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the track soon begins to lose momentum and becomes overly draggy, and once again, fails to satisfy. Instrumental “E5150” is boring, unenjoyable machine babble bullshit, very out of step with the rest of the album, and something I wouldn’t have listened to again if I didn’t feel an obligation to cover it here; avoid if you don’t feel like wasting three minutes of your time.

After that, the title track is almost a welcome relief, but still isn’t very good or interesting, with the classic rock-y, let’s all have a good time-feel making another unwelcome appearance, as well as on “Country girl”, which also has those sort of faux busted-heart lyrics I despise: “Don’t ever fall in looooove!/Don’t give your heart awaaaay!/No never, never fall in looooove… with a country giiirl!”. It sounds almost as generic as it looks here, which is to say a lot. Anyway, “Slipping away” is yet another unspectacular offering, despite some surprisingly good drumming and soloing, “Falling off the edge of the world” is another doomy cut in the vein of “southern cross”, but actually reaches being good (the only song here to do so) through some energetic riffing and vocal work, and “Over and over”, despite a bunch of killer soloing towards the end from Iommi, still has the album dragging its feet out the door with a dull, sluggish tempo.

And that’s it… bah, I really can’t describe “Mob rules” as being anything other than a disappointment, especially after “Heaven and hell”; yes, Dio does a uniformly great job with his vocal work, but there’s just no way he can pull the dead weight from the awkward, mostly-middling songwriting all by himself. I really don’t know what went wrong here, as Sabbath seemed to get a second wind from Dio’s presence on the previous record; maybe it’s as simple a thing as them rushing in strike when the iron was hot, and they just didn’t give “rules” the proper effort and care it needed in their haste. Maybe a year longer wait would’ve improved everything, who knows. But, as it stands, “Mob rules” is…

6.5 dead Ozzy’s out of 10.

Information
Released: 1981
Label: Warner
Website: www.blacksabbath.com
Black Sabbath
Ronnie James Dio: vocals
Tony Iommi: guitar
Terrance Butler: bass
Vinnie Appice: drums

Tracklist
01. Turn Up the Night
02. Voodoo
03. The Sign of the Southern Cross
04. E5150
05. The Mob Rules
06. Country Girl
07. Slipping Away
08. Falling Off the Edge of the World
09. Over and Over

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