Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

I recently took a real good listen to Black Sabbath's "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" (1973, 5th studio album) for the first time in 20 years. I had the CD for a brief time back in high school or college, but never got into it. So I sold it. As I read about music, specifically the history of metal, this album keeps coming up. So I recently re-acquired it.

Wow! This album is incredible! Just a few quick thoughts:
- Production values are dynamic (adding Rick Wakeman's keyboards and an orchestra work great)
- Great riffs throughout
- "Fluff" is a fantastically beautiful acoustic instrumental piece
- I've never felt such a strong link before between the Sabs and Jethro Tull, but it's here (slightly progressive blues based rock)
- Amazing power chords just after the 3:00 minute mark of "Spiral Architect" mixed with keyboard and orchestra for a fantastically heavy layered wall of power
- "Who Are You?" uses a distinctive analog pad keyboard sound and mentions "Big Brother" in the lyrics. Van Halen uses almost the same keyboard sound on the instrumental song "1984". Coincidence? Or did Van Halen do an intentional homage?

I'm inspired now to seek out more Sabbath (the only other ones I have are Paranoid and Master of Reality... I know... weak). I also had Heaven and Hell for a while and sold that. I need to revisit that. Plus I read good things about the late '80s albums with Tony Martin on vocals.

What's Under the Covers? or The Song Retains the Name

Off and on for a while now, I have wondered what kind of covers album I would put together if I were able to do so. Would I include Coal Chambers version of Shock the Monkey? What about Back In Black and Tomorrow Never Knows on the Living Colour album Collideøscope? Would I go back to 1989 for Faith No More's version of War Pigs? How about Testament's rendition of Nobody's Fault or perhaps the Guns N Roses version of Mama Kin? Actually the question that interests me most is what the rest of you might add to such a project. So impress us with how deep you can go and come up with covers worthy of their original glory.

(post written by dcedave)

Rossini, meet Ozzy

EAR FARM's 8+ is a weekly feature that showcases songs longer than 8 minutes. I loved this excerpt from this post in which he is visiting the final resting place of Rossini (turns out it wasn't as the remains had been moved):

There I was, sitting in semi-frightening near-darkness with the bones (again, NOT) of a true musical hero of mine. The skull that once contained the brain that birthed perfect crescendo after perfect crescendo lay in front of me in a crypt (NOT) and I could feel music creeping into my head. Not Rossini, but something else. It went: "Whatchoo gonna do..." duh duh - DUH DUH DUH DUH - Sabbath! It hit me like iron, man. There in front of me lie the bones (yawn, NOT) of the man who invented heavy metal. What? It's not too much of a stretch really. If Beethoven was the Led Zeppelin of the long long ago, then I'd put Rossini as yesteryear's Black Sabbath (and Wagner as Iron Madien and Rachmaninoff as Metallica - I could go on and on) without pause. Perhaps that's why people who like classical music don't care for heavy metal - they've heard it all before. Rossini was the "Spiral Architect" of a formula of quiet-loud-quiet heavy orchestral/operatic music that presaged Paranoid by a good 150 years and set the course for all of the thunderous overtures that would follow in the century after his demise. Surely at least a good half of everything "heavy" that's come since he wrote his overture to the opera William Tell could be directly attributed to Gioachino Rossini. Bazookas, jet airplanes, the Third Reich, Atlas Shrugged, John Goodman - I was on to something in front of that tomb and I knew it.