Review Summary: You people need to "Get A Grip" and realize this album is not THAT bad. Is it perfect? Hell no, but giving it a 1/5 is ridiculous.
Is Forbidden really as bad as people really say it?
No.
But, that’s not saying much.
Black Sabbath needs no introduction, but I still find it funny that Ozzy is considered to be the key vocalist of Sabbath when he was not even a part of half of the albums. I think we all love Ronny James Dio, but Tony Martin has not had it fair. Martin is almost universally shoved to the corner of the Sabbath alumni room when he is possibly the best Sabbath vocalist. But after listening to Sabbath’s Forbidden, I may now know why he is often shunned up by the Sabbath community.
Let’s be honest: you probably heard The Illusion Of Power, (it being the intro track and all), heard Ice-T, ejected the album immediately and ran off to tell your friends how much it sucked, never even thinking of returning to the album ever again. When I heard “The Illusion Of Power,” I nearly did the same thing. Is it the stock riff that kills it? The vocal style that is reminiscing of a stereotypical black “Oh praise tha lord Jesus!” priest that Martin decides to use? Is it the lame keyboard effects sprinkled on as an afterthought? Or is it Ice-T’s totally out of place appearance? If you’ve never heard this album before, now you know why. To be fair, Ice-T only has two lines of rap verses and he lasts a total of 10 seconds before vanishing and never appearing ever again, but 10 seconds of rap is enough for the average metalhead to get rageful, which is absolutely ridiculous. Rap is a great genre, and it's a shame that all metallers will immediately turn off the average rap song. Listen to GZA or Raekwon or Phrat Boyz or Wu-Tang or Gorillaz, then tell me rap sucks. Hating on rap, especially just a 10 second sample like in Illusion, makes you dumb. Time has changed, and I really like Illusion of Power. That riff truly is powerful!
Thankfully, the next song kicks ass! Get A Grip begins with a kick-to-the-face awesome riff by Iommi that makes you wanna go crazy shortly followed by a catchy chorus. While the song is quite good to the ear, it was the only song to be sold as a single off of this album and it never charted, which is a damn shame because it is one of Sabbath's best songs, no matter what era you are talking about. The music video is awesome too. It's really the best of all worlds.
The next track, Cant Get Close Enough is another listenable track that I loved in my youth, perhaps it was that lovely clean guitar tone of the intro and Tony Martin’s vocals are superb on this track. The lyrics really spoke to me, especially at the beginning of the track.
“How many tears must we cry before learning?” and “Just cant get close enough to you, cuz your just to far away.”
Unfortunately, there is one major problem: this song sounds absolutely nothing like something Sabbath would produce. It is more reminiscent of something Kurt Cobain would write and record, which isn’t something the average metal listener would want to hear from anything with the Black Sabbath logo on it.
The rest of the songs are just stock and generic filler tracks, and…that’s it. Shaking Off The Chains has a catchy progressive riff with a 5/4 time signature, and the verse is pretty catchy. After that, for sure, nothing eventful happens for the rest of the CD. None of it is awful, mind you, but I honestly cannot remember any other tracks. People seem to mention the title track, but I don’t find it to be anything special. The riffs are bland, the lyrics are bland, the song structures are bland, the EVERYTHING is bland. It appears that Iommi wrote three or four good songs but it wasn’t it enough to fill an entire album, so Tony conjured up 40 minutes of filler over a meal at Quiznos.
Forbidden’s biggest crime isn’t being awful, it’s biggest crime is being upsettingly boring. With the exclusion of the opening track, this album would probably be just another forgotten late 80’s era of Sabbath album like Headless Cross or The Eternal Idol. But because of the stock gloomy riff, the abundance of slow-mo soundbites pf “YOU FEAR ME”, Tony marching preaching the verses, the dorky choir singing “the illusion of powwah!” during the chorus, and the fact that this was the very first song on the album all build up to make this one of the worst experiences in Sabbath history. “The Illusion Of Power” sounds almost like an experiment, one that seemingly failed but upon further investigation actually succeeded. But, in all honesty, the rest of this album is alright.
Look up “Get A Grip” and “Cant Get Close Enough” on YouTube, but don’t waste your time on any other song on Forbidden.
