Unknown Soldier

Well it's certainly one of the catchiest metal albums I've ever heard.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier

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

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

The Batlord

Sounds painful.

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Plankton

"Mob Rules" and "Falling OTEOTW" regularly land somewhere on my playlists. Good write-up on it, and I've loved that album since it's inception.

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See location...

Unknown Soldier

If you're a fire performer or the Human Torch it's not.

It sure is an album built to last.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier

Verdict
I really didn’t want to do this again and that was to include another album by an artist that I had already picked on the year before. But in 1981 I couldn’t find anything more worthy for my ‘Down on the Slab’ section than Ozzy Osborune’s Diary of a Madman which again falls under category one above. I’d criticized Ozzy’s debut as being something of an artistic mess (see 1980 review) where Ozzy’s farsical singing style had been at complete loggerheads to the serious neo-classical playing of Randy Rhoads. This odd marriage though had created a highly successful team as Ozzy’s debut album had been a big commercial success and had gone down well with both fans and critics alike as a fairly groundbreaking effort. Diary of a Madman would equal that commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic and despite being regarded as having slightly inferior material was still seen as a crucial metal release back in 1981. Anyway as for the album, I actually dig Diary a lot more than Blizzard largely because Randy’s neo-classic playing has given over to an even more progressive style. This actually now creates a biting style with a moody and eerie feel to proceedings, and even more importantly Ozzy’s vocals seem far more in line with his playing too. I also think that the material by and large works better than on the debut, as both Ozzy and Randy seem to be moving more in the same direction here and there seems a greater unison. The stronger material on the album includes the pretty awesome album opener “Over the Mountain” which has Randy’s riffs melding as already said with Ozzy’s singing and they really should’ve written more tracks with this kind of bite in them! One of the album’s single’s "Flying High Again" is pretty decent, but probably nowhere near as good as it’s often made out to be. The best track though is “Believer” which is pretty stellar from Randy’s playing perspective and it’s one of the few times when Ozzy and Randy blended perfectly. Overall Diary of a Madman has a more mature and greater cohesive feel than the Blizzard of Ozz, but its big problem is that it’s let down by a number of mediocre tracks that pop up in its middle and latter sections, and these tracks really expose the belly of the album. These include “You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll” which drags to almost 7 monotonous minutes. The heavyish “Little Dolls” which unsuccessfully tries to give us a prime example of pop metal (the booming commercial thing back then) but the worst cut is surely the pretty dreadful ballad “Tonight” and this is a ballad which is not only bland, but it also plods two factors which usually make a ballad a painful listen, and even the power guitar playing at its end can’t really save its bacon either, luckily for the listener though the lively S.A.T.O comes right after it to pick the album up again. The title track "Diary of Madman" is very much Ozzy Osbourne in every aspect and I guess you either dig the track or not…… I didn’t. Overall and deep down I don’t find Diary of a Madman to be the misfit of an album that Blizzard of Ozz was and overall it’s an album that’s almost there in what it tries to do and that is to try and create a more classic and contemporary metal album for its time, which imo it doesn’t quite do but that’s not to say that it’s a poor album either. After the release of Diary of a Madman, the following year would see guitarist Randy Rhoads sadly die a premature death in a plane crash and this would end Ozzy’s vital relationship that he had built up his initial solo career on, a musical relationship which he would never quite manage again as a solo artist. That same year a new American line-up would record a live double album Speak of the Devil in 1982 that consisted wholly of Black Sabbath covers. After this and with a few more tweaks with the line-up, the band would go onto record Ozzy’s third studio album Bark at the Moon and by the time of Bark at the Moon, Ozzy if it was possible had sunk into the ultimate caricature of himself!

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier

1982

1982 is the year probably best remembered as the metal avalanche that was known as Iron Maiden now with Bruce Dickinson on board and for Judas Priest releasing one of their most iconic albums. Before 1982 Iron Maiden had been one of the biggest metal acts around, but now with Bruce Dickinson in the line-up they would now take the next step upto superstar status, a level reserved largely just for the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin to name just a couple. Def Leppard would also be the other NWOBHM band to achieve this level of status, but would have to wait till the following year to do so with Pyromania. Arena style metal was still the dominant metal stance for a lot of metal bands and others aspired to this type of posturing as well, as that was by and large metal's principal commercial outlet. Of the established acts who had put out strong albums in 1981 the year was largely an extension of what they’d done the previous year, but as already said 1982 luckily saw a return to form for some of metal’s principal bands like Judas Priest, who had mis-fired on Point of Entry but came back full blast on Screaming for Vengeance. Kiss finally came in from the cold after their less than successful tampering with pop on several disappointing albums. But most interestingly, the year saw a couple of bright albums from newish bands that would help make the ‘glam metal’ genre explode commercially in the USA the very following year, as these bands were now adding fuel to the fire already started by Motley Crue. The faster end of the metal spectrum was kept alive by speed metal acts like Anvil and Tank, but largely these bands were just keeping the speed seat warm for the even meaner thrash movement that would burst onto the metal scene very shortly. Also in just a few short years, the NWOBHM had firmly established itself as a label for the vast majority of British metal bands and most of these bands were very much the established new guard now, despite the fact that a number of new British metal bands were still constantly fighting for that elusive record deal. The year saw things as fast moving as ever and again it caught a number of bands out, as bands like Saxon seemed hesitant in what they were doing and Diamond Head read the script wrong yet again, despite the fact they were most talented metal band around! The early 1980s also proved that you didn’t have to release an album every year to maintain your status as a major metal act, as bands like Def Leppard and the now veteran Scorpions (who did release an album in 1982) showed that constant touring especially in the USA, was just as good as releasing a platinum album for maximum exposure. One thing was for certain anyway and that was that the immediate future of metal was centred around the USA regardless the origin of the band, as the next two metal revolutions in the next few years would largely be on American soil.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier

Album
1982 was such a great year with so many albums vying for a top 20 slot and some of the choices that I made here, ended up being in favour of albums and bands that made an everlasting impact on metal, rather than albums that were musically better. The Manowar debut was one such album that fell into this first category and beat albums by bands such as the sophomore of Raven, the only album ever put out by NWOBHM band Shiva, Spanish metal in Baron Rojo and a nearly there album by Whitesnake were just some of the albums beaten by the Manowar debut here. The name Manowar usually evokes strong opinions amongst metalheads and these opinions often denote Manowar as being the complete anthithesis of everything they see great about metal from a negative viewpoint, but this is equally countered by others (such as me) who see the band as being the epitome of everything metal. I consider myself a big Manowar fan, not so much in their actual music, but more in them being a genuine celebration of metal and all its established clichés. Manowar would go on to be so influential on 1980s metal, that they can probably be seen as the principal motivators of the soon to be ‘power metal’ genre (easily one of my favourite sub-metal genres) making them pretty groundbreaking in what they were doing. The band were formed in New York 1980 by bassist and band leader Joey DeMaio, who soon recruited highly reputable guitarist Ross the Boss ex-Dictators and ex-Shakin Street a French metal band who once appeared earlier in this journal (see 1978 review) drummer Donnie Hamzik and finally vocalist Eric Adams, an ex-butcher who claimed to have a five-and-a-half octave vocal range! The criteria of this new band was quite simple and that was to be the loudest metal band in the world and also the truest, and in my opinion that’s exactly what they would achieve over their next several albums. Manowar were never a band to be taken too seriously and their debut album Battle Hymns which features here, is certainly encumbered by a number of badly used metal clichés and less than impressive song writing ability on certain songs, but the pure and potential epicness of the band is there from the word go, and this talent covers over these cracks making Battle Hymns an interesting ‘power metal starter album’. The album starts with “Death Tone” with its Kiss influenced “Detroit Rock City” opener and in general the song has that Kiss aroma throughout, but Manowar play louder than Kiss ever did though. By the time of the excellent second track ‘the celebration of metal anthem’ “Metal Daze” you really know what this band are all about and that is quite simply epic metal that’s here to stay! The band then truly blend speed metal into their powerful repertoire on “Fast Taker” the best track on the album, before the album then dips into clichéd and patchy song choices, but there’s still enough here to keep you engaged. The band though get things right on the album closer, the epic title track “Battle Hymn” all hail glorious metal!

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

The Batlord

Manowar sucks.

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Isbjørn

Are you drunk?

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