Black Sabbath
Reunion
Epic
Tony Iommi, Terry “Geezer” Butler, Bill Ward, and of course, John “Ozzy” Osbourne. Either you loved Black Sabbath or you hated them. And if not hate, you were at least afraid of their stygian imagery and the sociopolitical pathos of “Children of the Grave,” Hand Of Doom,” and “Electric Funeral.” So this live reunion of these original members, imaginatively titled Reunion , is one of those things that if you weren’t into this stuff as a kid, you’d be better served over in the K-Tel 70’s Compilation department. I was into
Black Sabbath – big time. Critics called their music plodding, stupid, immature. They were right. But Sabbath was there in the late ’60s as “Earth” – another British psychedelic-blues band that turned into something feral, something fiery (something evil?). And Sabbath was there in the ’70s, with a string of million selling albums like the heavy metal prototype Paranoid and the progressive metal prototype Sabbath Bloody Sabbath , which rendered everything that came after rather pointless. And Sabbath hung on in the 80’s, with a litany of Ozzy replacements giving it a whirl: Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillian, Glenn Hughes, et al. Reunion was recorded in their hometown of Birmingham, England, and very little has changed. If the mere mention of “War Pigs,” “Sweet Leaf,” and “Iron Man” doesn’t raise your blood pressure, you probably haven’t read this far anyway.
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