Sabbath hit their nadir
Artiste: Black Sabbath
Nationality: British (English)
Album: Never say die!
Year: 1978
Label: Vertigo
Genre: Heavy metal
Tracks:
Never say die
Johnny blade
Junior's eyes
A hard road
Shock wave
Air dance
Over to you
Breakout
Swinging the chain
Chronological position: Eighth album
Familiarity: "Paranoid", "Sabbath bloody Sabbath", "We sold our soul for rock and roll", "Black Sabbath", "Heaven and Hell", "Born again", "Master of reality", "Vol 4"
Interesting factoid: I think it's the only album Bill Ward sings on...!
Initial impression: Rocky, uptempo, but is that not...?
Best track(s): Never say die, A hard road
Worst track(s): Shockwave, Over to you, Breakout
Comments: This is something of an oddity in the Sabbath canon. I wanted to listen to it (and review it) for several reasons. Firstly, it's the last album to feature Ozzy, and presages the rich Dio years. Secondly, it's an album that's not too long after classics like "Vol 4" and "Master of reality", and thirdly, Ozzy has gone on record to say he hates the album, and thinks they never should have recorded it. Not that he was there for much of it...
I have to say that the opener, and title track, bears a striking resemblance to a well-known Lizzy track. Let's see who had it out first... oh dear! "The boys are back in town" was released in 1976! The guitar riff is very similar. Well, let's go on.
Johnny blade has a rather disconcertingly proggy warbly keyboard intro, but then settles down into classic Sabs, powerful and grindy and then gets the door kicked in with a real blistering Iommi solo near the end. Sweet Geezer Butler bassline to open
Junior's eyes, kind of a funky feel to it, while
A hard road sounds almost celtic with a shot of Status Quo twelve-bar blues thrown in.
Some nice almost classical piano from Don Airey in "Air dance", which more or less qualifies as a slow song, perhaps ballad for most of its run, but then goes both rocky and jazzy near the end, quite confused really. Almost like listening to Santana on speed... "Over to you" reminds me of the main melody from, um, Chris Rea's "Deep water", though I think that was a later release --- yeah, 1983. So fair enough then. But a lot of this album is quite derivative, and even here I can detect influences from bands as diverse as ELO and already-mentioned Thin Lizzy.
I'm not sure really if the piano/organ works on this album; it certainly softens the expected heavy Sabbath sound and makes the music a little hard to assimilate: it's just not what you imagine you're going to hear when you rack up an Ozzy-era Sabs album. Even at that, although I would rate this down near the lower end of Black Sabbath's work, I don't think it deserves the epiteth "disgusting" that Ozzy later labelled it with. If he didn't like it, fine, but I think he went a little overboard there. Oh dear though: brass just does not work on a Sabbath album, and the sole instrumental
Breakout is just
awful! The closer,
Swinging the chain says it all really, when Bill Ward on vocals growls "We're so sorry/ We're really sorry.."
And so you should be guys.
Overall impression: Very disappointed. I almost can see Ozzy's point...
Intention: Hey it's Sabbath: I have more albums to listen to. Chalk this one up as an aberration, yeah?