01. Black Sabbath Mob Rules 1981 (Vertigo)
Heavy Metal
If you say you don’t love me..........you’ll burn!
Overview
Heaven and Hell had been a romping return to form by the mighty Black Sabbath and without doubt their best studio album since 1975’s
Sabotage and it had also been one of their biggest selling albums ever.
Heaven and Hell was a landmark album and certainly one of the most important for the 1980s, as its power and boldness would shape much of the metal scene for the rest of the decade, especially when it came to promoting bombastic metal vocals. The band had undergone a major stylistic change by bringing in the dungeons and dungeons lyrics of Dio and the band’s basic guitar led tracks now had Dio singing right across Tony Iommi’s riffs to masterful effect.
Heaven and Hell though hadn’t been all roses as far as the band were concerned, given the well known issues concerning both Geezer Butler and Bill Ward. These issues would now see the band going through a pivotal change, as by the time of
Mob Rules the band were without original drummer Bill Ward in the set-up and his replacement from the previous tour Vinnie Appice continued to great effect on the
Mob Rules album. Also the album saw Geezer Butler on bass looking interested again, after he’d gone for a walkabout on the
Heaven and Hell recordings, before controversially coming back on board. Again keyboardist Geoff Nicholls is treated as an additional member of the band, but does get a good solo stint on the synthesizer instrumental “E5150”. All the tracks on the album are group compositions (minus Vinnie Appice) with Dio scoring all the the track lyrics. In terms of commercial sales
Mob Rules went gold in the US and silver in the UK which all kept the band firmly in the commercial spotlight. The album contained three singles in "The Mob Rules" "Turn up the Night" and "Voodoo" and all three scored on both sides of the Atlantic. The album would also be the last Black Sabbath album recorded by Martin Birch, who after this recording would put himself in the hands of Iron Maiden as their in-house producer, as he had already recorded the
Killers album for Iron Maiden and largely carried this energy across to
Mob Rules. The album’s impressive artwork was based on a modified version of fantasy artist Greg Hildebrandt’s work and it’s an album cover that’s interesting to say the least. For any completists out there, the same line-up here also features on the the band’s 1982 live release, the whopping 83 minutes of the double
Live Evil which was recorded on the ‘Mob Rules’ tour.
Verdict
Most reviews often state
Mob Rules as a slightly inferior version of
Heaven and Hell, which it more or less mirrors to a tee and generally treat the album overall as the lesser metal essential. Personally I’d say that was a load of bollocks, sure
Heaven and Hell might’ve been the more landmark record, but on
Mob Rules the band were literally on fire and recorded one of the greatest albums to grace metaldom at the start of the 1980s! I guess a similar analogy could be made with Motorhead’s
Overkill and
Bomber albums, as
Bomber does it for me from those two albums.
Mob Rules certainly has similarities with
Heaven and Hell in terms of track selection, as on the previous album they opened up with the fast-paced “Neon Knights” and they match that here with “Turn up the Night” with its cooking riff. But it’s on the second track “Voodoo” that the listener gets a hints that things are going to be a little different on
Mob Rules, as the song displays the heaviness and bombastic approach of most of the album. This approach is largely thanks to producer Martin Birch who pumps up the power and the track is one of the muscle highlights of the album. This though is a kind of prelude to the seven-minute epic “Sign of the Southern Cross” whose acoustic opening belies the power that would follow on the rest of the song and it’s without doubt the T-bone steak of the album! Other heavy tracks include the raw title track “The Mob Rules” the rockier ‘Iron Man’ sounding “Country Girl” and these are both glorious tracks. Another gem hidden away on the b-side is “Falling off the Edge of the World” which has Dio initially sounding like Freddie Mercury with that slowish Queen type intro, before the track goes through a serious pace change and we’re met with another heavy mogadon monster. This is then perfectly followed by the album closer “Over and Over” which serves as the curtain call for the album with some pretty epic playing by Tony Iommi! The lesser album track is “Slipping Away” which does feel like quality filler with its fleshed out guitar and bass work, but it’s still far from bad. Then there is the album oddity the sub-three minute synthesizer instrumental “E5150” which harks back to the more experimental mid-period Sabbath albums of the 1970s and certainly seems out of place here, even though it’s a great atmospheric track and the mood created here would be the kind of thing that Eddie Van Halen would put out on Van Halen’s more moody synthesized outings. Overall what’s great about the Dio era in Sabbath, is the simple fact that the somewhat iconic reign of Ozzy Osbourne had produced a legendary metal band, thanks to his signature vocal style and image. Therefore the transition by the band to accommodate a dominant powerhouse vocalist like Dio had been a bold move and possibly one of the riskiest in rock history as world famous bands didn’t usually just change their whole musical perspective. The move would cement Dio as one of the greatest, if not the greatest vocalist in the history of metal (for those that love dominant vocalists of course) and both he and Ozzy would cement the Sabbath brand forever.
Mob Rules is an epic album and for anybody looking to take just 10 metal albums on a desert island quest, then surely consider
Mob Rules as one of those albums!
Dio- Vocals
Tony Iommi- Guitar
Geezer Butler- Bass
Vinnie Appice- Drums
Geoff Nicholls- Keyboards
Production- Martin Birch