MUDKISS FANZINE

Having recently completed a reading of Black Sabbath - The Classic Years 1969-1975 by Paul Wilkinson, the belated arrival of the band’s classic sophomore album, Paranoid, in all it’s expanded, re-mastered, 3-disc, surround-sound glory, couldn’t have occurred at a more auspicious juncture. After slavishly hacking my way through 239-pages of references to the supertonic, the mediant and the subdominant, Wilkinson’s technical one-up-man-ship and tedious literary nuances had left me hankering for an aural reminder of why I had even bothered to read a pretentious book about Black Sabbath in the first place. Admittedly, Wilkinson had never promised me a rose garden, nor, for that matter, had he promised me a serviceable biographical history of the band, but by the time his potted his-story had dissolved into a fog of dry ice, I was in dire need of constant repetition of an audible bent.

I first encountered Paranoid as a 12-year-old-school-boy, back in 1974. I purchased my copy from Bonnell & Curtis in Warwick, and cycled home with it double-bagged to protect its cover from the still falling rain. I can visualise the moment it was debagged in my bedroom to reveal it’s striking cover, and remember thinking: it’s a fat bloke, with pants over his tights, brandishing a plastic sword/shield combination (reminiscent of a set I myself had ‘won’ at the Mop Fair a mere handful of years earlier) – what’s so scary about that? The needle hit the vinyl, War Pigs emanated from the speakers. OK! I’m scared now.

Originally released in October 1970: Black Sabbath – Paranoid – (Universal/Sanctuary Records) is fast approaching its 40th birthday. Its influence shows no sign of waning, indeed, sub-genres still form in its considerbale wake. It’s undeniable, the reverence remains. Despite Led Zeppelin’s compositional and technical superiority, it is Black Sabbath who are rightly or wrongly regarded as the true originators of heavy metal, and, in particular, doom metal. As anyone familiar with the metal creation myth will doubtless attest, had it not been for an accident in the work place involving Tony Iommi and a sharp object, the flattened fifth could have remained one of Leonard Cohen’s secret chords forever, and the human riff machine that is Iommi could have ended up a bluesman! In a time before method statements and risk assessments, the first cut was the deepest, and doom metal was born.

In terms of sound quality, Paranoid has been mastered to perfection. Every filthy chord, every strident note, every solid beat, every tortured wail, seeps from the walls as if the band’s gear were set up in your front room. The songs remain the same, but here they sound rejuvenated, somehow capturing the zeitgeist of the here and now, forty long years from whence they came. For those of you with quadraphonic capabilities, the surround-sound mix from 1974 graces Disc 2, whilst Disc 3 contains outtakes and instrumentals, including a uniquely uninspired alternative take of the title track that sounds as if Ozzy is making it up as he goes along: fascinating. Also available on vinyl as a double LP sans quadraphenia, Universal/Sanctuary are set to release Black Sabbath and Masters Of Reality in similar fashion toward the end of June CE2009.

Having created doom metal back in 1970, it’s entirely fitting that two of Sabbath’s original members have now risen once again to bequeath an album capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with anything created during the band’s golden years (1970-72): Heaven & Hell – The Devil You KnowHeaven & Hell, and The Devil You Know could well turn out to be a post-modern metal uber-classic in excelsis. Having lived with the record for over a month now, I can attest to its enormous power, skilled craftsmanship and enduring qualities. It’s a gargantuan exercise in retaking the fundamental metal ground more recently occupied by charlatans, fakers and Nazis. With most of these gentlemen in possession of valid bus-passes, The Devil You Know must surely be putting the wind up the massed ranks of young pretenders right now. It really is that good a record. Iommi’s guitar playing throughout is nothing short of a master class. How one man has written so many copper-bottomed riffs in one career is simply beyond comprehension. With Ronnie James Dio also hitting a career high note well into his sixties, this album sent me scurrying all the way back to Rainbow Rising in celebration. For those of you quick off the mark, there’s a limited edition double-disc set available with a DVD that makes far more entertaining and enlightening viewing than my hackneyed words could dare convey. It’s at times when you think that you know it all that records like this crop up to confirm the exact opposite. (Roadrunner Records) is everything it’s title suggests. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Vinny Appice and Ronnie James Dio are

Confirming doom metal’s continued relevance, and it’s ability to adapt and over come, is the 10th studio album from North Yorkshire’s My Dying Bride – For Lies I Sire For Lies I Sire is a stunning return to form for My Dying Bride and a possible career peak in many respects. From the maudlin strains of opener My Body A Funeral to the caustic claustrophobia of the closing Death Triumphant, the album is a majestic triumph of epic proportions. Veering from the eerily haunting to the crushingly heavy, For Lies I Sire sends the likes of Candlemass and Opeth paling into insignificance. The vocals span the range from clean to growl and back again, the guitars, a soup of primordial sludge. Baroque melody abounds, like Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds gone doom. The juxtaposition between extremity and calamity is handled with taste and flair throughout, ever growing in stature with each repeated listen, For Lies I Sire is the work of a band at the top of it’s game. For the geeks and budding axe-wielders amongst you, the ‘Special UK Guitar Edition Pack’ comes complete with an extended 24-page booklet, a bonus 12-page booklet of guitar tablatures, and a unique customised My Dying Bride plectrum. (Peaceville Records). 

As a timely illustration of how far doom metal has mutated since 1970, the arrival of the seventh long player from sunn 0))) – Monoliths & Dimensions (Southern Lord Records) – has been heavily documented, from hipster metal magazines to glossy Sunday supplements. Following a decade or more grubbing about in the margins, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley are finally getting the recognition they deserve for creating the sub-genre that is: drone doom. Those of you familiar with the dying embers of trakMARX will probably recall me rambling inanely about sunn 0))) a couple of years ago, around the time of their ground-breaking collaboration with Japanese doom lords, Boris (Altar). If you ignore 2008’s vinyl only relic from the duo’s Bergen Cathedral happening at the Borealis Festival of 2007, Dømkirke, Monoliths & Dimensions is ostensibly the follow-up to sunn 0)))’s break-through LP, Black One, a record inspired and informed by the misanthropic rage of true Norwegian Black Metal. As a devotee of that particular release, I am both surprised and elated to inform you that the bar has been raised once again with Monoliths & Dimensions, without doubt sunn 0)))’s most coherent and satisfying full length to date. Featuring contributions from Oren Ambarchi, Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Tormentor), Dylan Carlson (Earth), Julian Priester (Sun Ra, John Coltrane’s African Brass, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant) and new-music horn player Stuart Dempster, as well as string arrangements from Eyvind Kang (John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell) and a Viennese woman's choir led by Persian vocal savant Jessika Kenney, Monoliths & Dimensions achieves everything sunn 0))) have threatened for a decade, and so much more. Dominated by Csihar’s enigmatic vocals and haunted by Kang’s unsettling arrangements, the album elevates Anderson and O’Malley to the upper echelons of the avant-garde aristocracy. To think that there was a time when distributors wouldn’t touch their art with a Violet Banks salt sculpted bargepole, it is somewhat disconcerting to find sunn 0))) cowling out from the arts section of Saturday’s Guardian, but, having given up a lifetime’s musical snobbery last new year, this is one resolution I’m not going to break. Hardcore fanatics may well designate Monoliths & Dimensions sunn 0)))’s pop album, and subsequently deride it as a compromise and a charade, whilst neophytes will doubtless be dumbstruck with awe. From the reassuring familiarity of the opening Aghartha to the 2001 Space Oddity of the closing Alice, the link between Black Sabbath and Miles Davies has finally been established, and the circle has been completed once again.

• www.blacksabbath.com
• www.black-sabbath.com
• www.peaceville.com
• www.southernlord.com

Jean Encoule 21/05/09

Mail me: musicreviews@mudkiss.com