Review Summary: A godly singer and a godly band both fall in this god awful mess.
Probably, if it was 1983, had you seen Black Sabbath even two years ago, they'd of been riding high. With the success of
Heaven and Hell and earning their deserved success back into the world, it'd be hard to spot just how... supercilious it seems. Right after
Mob Rules, Dio ditched the band and moved on to a greener pasture - forming his own band - and Ozzy was long gone by now; therefore, the remaining members of the good ol' metal band got together and smoked a few lit joints with vocalist Ian Gillan (Deep Purple). The blueprint of it alone sounded good: a legendary metal vocalist and a legendary metal band. What they produced was one of the worst-produced, badly-written, ugly-covered albums in Sabbath’s discography. All work and no play makes Sabbath a dull band, right?
Unfortunately, nothing they even had planned worked. Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan had no business singing for Black Sabbath. Ian’s all about space truckin’ and smoke on the water, not devil worship. Thank Satan he didn't carry on with the Sabs - both Sabbath and Gillan knew what a mismatch they were for each other, and went their separate ways.
To be completely honest, it's not the worst piece of music Sabbath has written. In the proceeding years, they fell harder on their asses than they would of dreamed of with
Born Again - and amongst all the trash, this is surprisingly cordial. Half of the whole album is more or less Gillan or the band trying to fit in with eachother, the rest about as thrilling as Krokus during the 80's. “Zero The Hero” is notable only because a) the riff sounds like something G’N’R ripped off for “Paradise City” and b) Ian actually stoops to singing about eating raw liver by the river.
That's probably the shame of the album - at this point, Sabbath had probably been suffering from severe writer's block, and began to write about the most ridiculous topics: all it ended up being was stupid. Gillan's bluesy, screaming voice isn't bad, mind you - Ian is a terrific vocalist and always will be since his shining moment in Jesus Christ Superstar - but here it doesn't fit in the slightest. "Digital Bitch" is about Ian offering to be the loving and dominant master of an “emotional looter”. Yuck. “Hot Line” is as generic in theme and sound as anything shat out by the cock-rock brigade, and “Keep It Warm”, apart from the solo, is even worse.
At this point, perhaps the only good thing about this album is that it has an end. They had truly hit a bad patch, and never really recovered; when your idea of villainy is merely “disturbing” a priest and drinking while driving, then it’s time to go back to highway stars. The riffs are as generic and boring as the song, with the aforementioned "Zero the Hero" just proving it from the opening minutes. The rest of it is about as thrilling as Ratt or Warrant, with a heavier level of distortion, more excessive wailing, and lousy attempts to whip up a Satanic image instead of the usual hedonism.
However, there are at least some diamonds in the rough:
The Fallen contains a very heavy main riff, with a surprisingly decent performances by Gillan: there's barely a break in timbre from top to bottom.
Trashed is an utterly insane track with a cadenza of riffage and drum explosions that give Ian a chance to scream and yell like he always does; he's not the same as he was in Child in Time, of course, but Trashed is a very cheeky track. The problem is, these two very good tracks aren't enough to force you to endure this form of torture. In that rough saga known as Sab’s career, this marked the part of the story where everything starts to fall apart and the protagonist begins his long decline. Unless you want to hear a tired Sabbath unsuccessfully trying to interface with a worn-out former singer for Deep Purple, I’d steer right clear of Born Again.
