Black Sabbath - Anno Domini 1989-1995 (2024) FLAC
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killingfloorman10256
Jun 12, 2024, 8:05:44 PMJun 12
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Being the second-best lead singer in a band’s long career hardly seems like a prestigious role, but in Black Sabbath, it’s a coveted spot. Probably most Sabbath fans would award that status to Ronnie James Dio – as would the band itself, presumably, since they dropped the star of this particular box set when Dio became available again, only to hire him back afterward. But although Dio made enough of an impact that a certain demographic among metal fans would push Ozzy himself into the second-best slot, there’s a small but hopefully growing group that bestows that honor on Birmingham’s own Tony “The Cat” Martin, whose tenure with the band is documented in Anno Domini 1989-1995, a four-CD collection that comes with all the usual box…
435 MB 320 ** FLAC
…set fripperies and ephemera.
Martin’s Black Sabbath career actually started a little earlier than 1989, when he stepped in to re-record the vocals for the band’s ‘87 opus The Eternal Idol after the previous hire, Badlands singer Ray Gillen, proved unsatisfactory. The Eternal Idol has a slightly disjointed quality, and the songs weren’t ideal for Martin’s voice, but that doesn’t matter because it’s not included here, so we start with Martin firmly ensconced in the lead vocalist role. He went on to be the singer and co-songwriter on four more Black Sabbath albums, and presented here in remastered versions, with 1995’s Forbidden – the band’s final album until their reunion with Ozzy almost two decades later – presented in an entirely new Tony Iommi mix. So that makes the box set’s roll call, in reverse order of both chronology and quality, Forbidden, Cross Purposes (1994), Tyr (1990) and, first and foremost, 1989’s epic Headless Cross.
Headless Cross was the sound of a dinosaur awakening after a long period of hibernation, finding itself in a new and unfamiliar landscape and trying to blend in; in other words Black Sabbath with a new sense of purpose. After a storming start to the ‘80s with two powerful, NWOBHM-adjacent classics, Heaven and Hell and the slightly less good Mob Rules, Sabbath hadn’t so much faltered as fallen apart. The should-have-worked Born Again, with its combination of three-quarters of the classic Sabbath lineup plus Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, was a comedy of errors. Graced, appropriately, with one of the worst album covers of all time, it was a lot of fun, but mostly not very good and certainly not at the cutting edge of metal in ’83 as Heaven and Hell had been in 1980. It also cost the band the greatest of rock drummers, Bill Ward, who went into rehab, quitting music for the better part of a decade, and their bassist and main songwriter, Geezer Butler, who would rejoin again with Dio in the early ‘90s. 1986’s Seventh Star with the great Glenn Hughes on vox – another Deep Purple alumnus, not for the last time – is a pretty decent hard rock album, but it doesn’t sound like Black Sabbath — because it wasn’t. A rebranded Iommi solo album, it showed the guitarist trying out a more commercial, MTV approach and why not? But also, why? The Eternal Idol was a little heavier, but essentially arrived after everyone involved, including the fans, had lost interest in it, but Headless Cross was something else. After being impressed by Martin’s voice and professionalism, Iommi invited him to be the band’s singer, and the two Tonys set to work on a series of new songs that were far more Sabbath-like than anything since Mob Rules.
As a statement of intent, the resurrected Black Sabbath opens with “The Gates of Hell,” an effective minute or so of sinister, doom-laden atmospherics, before launching into the title track. The new Black Sabbath was not quite the Sabbath of yore, nor was it a collection of prestigious sessioneers, as with the previous couple of albums. This time round, there were Tony & Tony, keyboard player Geoff Nichols, who had been with the band since the Dio days, and on the drums, Mr Cozy Powell. Powell was – might as well admit it – no Bill Ward, but he was nevertheless an authentic drumming icon – for his work with Jeff Beck, Rainbow, Whitesnake et al, and one who, like Ward, had an identifiable style. A couple of session bassists fill in admirably, and while they aren’t Geezer, they add to the album’s glossy professionalism. But glossy or not, “Headless Cross” is definitely Black Sabbath. Martin had an interest in folklore, mythology, history and the supernatural that was, like Dio’s mysticism, entirely sympathetic to the Sabbath aura. His lyrics, as well as his voice, give his work with the band a distinctive character, and crucially he seemed to coax the most authentically Black Sabbathian riffs in years from Iommi.
All that said, this was a Black Sabbath for the late ‘80s, and from Powell’s thunderous, metronomic beat to the atmospheric synths and soaring chorus, “Headless Cross” is an ‘80s hard rock anthem. Martin’s voice is powerful but superbly controlled, with a clear, dramatic enunciation that breathes life into his evocative, occasionally silly lyrics. His voice is solidly in the mold of the Dio/Glenn Hughes/Joe Lynn Turner rough-smooth rock singer beloved of ‘80s radio, but it’s distinctive and expressive too, and there’s a cheesy kind of magic – but magic nonetheless – in the combination of his soaring voice and Iommi’s characteristically baleful guitar tone. Powell’s pounding drums are superbly recorded, and Powell and Iommi’s always-great production sounds even better in the remaster. “Headless Cross” is great, and so, at least half of the time, is Headless Cross. There’s a lot of good, solid, atmospheric hard rock; songs like “Black Moon” and “Nightwing” – there’s a decent heavy ballad, “When Death Calls,” that features a nice guest solo from Brian May, and there are the best commercial/’80s rock songs that Sabbath ever recorded. “Devil and Daughter” is exhilarating and catchy, while “Kill in the Spirit World,” with its baffling lyrics about ghosts killing each other or something(?) and an unfortunate hint of “Eye of the Tiger,” is even better. More importantly, “Kill…” has a simply phenomenal lead vocal by T Martin that it’s hard to imagine any singer improving on. Check out the second verse that begins “Behold the dead, clutching at fading hands …” – Dio himself couldn’t have belted it out it better.
Though it got the band back on track, Headless Cross is not immune to the slight sense of ludicrousness that has always dogged Black Sabbath. The cover is cool enough if slightly cheap-looking, illogically but somehow typically for the Sabbath world not showing a headless cross but a complete one. The video for the marginally superior single edit of the title track is pure Spinal Tap comedy theater – and therefore great, but … And Martin’s lyrics, though superb and perfectly suited to the Sabbathverse, also feature a cast of angels, demons, spirits and witches, not to mention Satan himself, characters so stereotypically metal that even the band themselves balked a little and would take quite a different tack for their next release, Tyr, which followed in 1990.
The newly confident Black Sabbath returned with Whitesnake bassist Neil Murray completing the lineup and a new mythology-heavy direction that found them entering the new decade somewhat uncertainly. The album looked far classier than its predecessor, presaging the visuals of many a pagan/black metal album later in the decade, and its opening track, “Anno Mundi” is one of the finest and most accomplished of their post-Ozzy career. Heavy but melodic it boasts a mystical atmosphere and a beautifully judged Martin vocal and lyrics that were intriguing as well as melodramatic. It’s exactly what you’d want a more mature, thoughtful Black Sabbath to sound like. But while “Anno Mundi” is great, Tyr itself is only fine. It sounds great, with a fantastically thunderous drum sound – Powell and Iommi produced again – and a nice contrast between heavy guitars and pervasively atmospheric synths, but the material is overall just a little less inspired this time around. The fast songs – like “The Law Maker,” which has a headlong Iron Maiden quality, and the solid “Valhalla” feel a little undistinguished, while the self-consciously epic stuff is a bit stodgy. But “Valhalla”’s extended intro, “Odin’s Court” is lovely, and “The Sabbath Stones” is suitably eerie. There’s also an anomalous kind of hair metal power ballad, “It Feels Good,” which stands out strangely amid the pagan landscapes, but it’s nice enough, even if it feels like a refugee from The Seventh Star.
The next time Black Sabbath reconvened, it was with the Mob Rules lineup, jettisoning Tony Martin, Cozy Powell and any sense of career momentum, instead reuniting with Geezer, Dio and Vinnie Appice. The sour, harsh attendant album, Dehumanizer is surely few people’s favorite Black Sabbath record, and so when Dio and Appice quit after touring, Martin again received the call and, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to rejoin the band. Geezer was still onboard, but Powell wasn’t, so the band called in yet another Rainbow alumnus, Bobby Rondinelli, to occupy the drumming stool. Cross Purposes is perhaps the worst and most shrug-inducing Black Sabbath album title of them all, but the album itself is an advance on Dehumanizer, though somewhat in the same “modern” mold. Quality-wise it’s in the same league as Tyr; solid-to-good, even if it lacks a song of the magnitude of “Anno Mundi.” The album is blessed, even in its remastered version, with a slightly trebly drum and vocals sound compared to its predecessors, but the guitars and bass are urgent and heavy. “I Witness” is a decent, energetic opener, but frustratingly it threatens an epic chorus that never quite arrives, and instead its best feature is some unusually modern, semi-dissonant Iommi chords among the riffage.
The album has its highlights; “Cross of Thorns” is angry and heavy, with just a hint of the grandeur that Martin was capable of, and “Virtual Death” shows Black Sabbath convincingly reclaiming the doom genre they invented. Still, although the impression the album leaves is pretty good, there are more characterless songs than one would like; “Psychophobia” sounds like a supercharged version of Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night,” but with none of its cheesy soulfulness, “Immaculate Deception” has a funky guitar riff ,but no Bill Ward to transmute it into gold and no real tune. As if to highlight the band’s slight lack of identity, Eddie Van Halen pops up to shred on the closing “Evil Eye,” and it doesn’t sound as out of place as you’d hope EVH might sound on a Sabbath record. Cross Purposes does grow with repeated listens, but it’s generally a bit drab and a lot of noise for not much return so there’s no huge incentive to stick with it unless you’re a fan, despite the many good bits. For this reissue, the Japan-only track “What’s the Use” has been added. It’s quite fast. Actually, it’s not bad, being oddly Dio-like lyrics-wise; but mostly, it’s quite fast.
There was clearly no way that the band could make two consecutive albums with the same lineup, so for their swansong-for-a-bit, Forbidden, they reunited the Tyr lineup again, bringing Neil Murray and Cozy back from limbo. The album itself sounds more like Dehumanizer than Tyr though, and to exacerbate its perceived issues, Iommi hired Body Count’s Ernie C to produce and invited Ice-T to contribute to its lead track “The Illusion of Power.” Perceived issues, because much of the album’s critical failure – not just critical, the band hated it too – have been laid at Ernie C’s door. But if that was true, the new, Iommi-approved Forbidden would be fantastic, and is it? Well. Firstly, the album has never been as bad as its reputation suggests anyway – it’s easily as good as Cross Purposes for example – and, secondly, if you really didn’t like it before, you still really won’t like it now. The Iommi mix definitely has a better, less tinny drum sound and is a little fuller overall, but otherwise the album is much as it was. That is, there are gestures toward something a bit different, heavier and more modern, notably on the faintly ridiculous “Illusion of Power” and the jagged title track, but the best songs are mostly those like “Sick and Tired” that hark back to the Headless Cross sound in all its corny-edged glory. Neither Ernie C or Iommi’s production seems quite to show Martin at his best, so presumably it’s the songs that are at fault, but he’s great on “Forbidden” and “Sick and Tired” and very good elsewhere. In fact, the album’s biggest impediment isn’t the production or the performances but the general atmosphere of weary unoriginality that hangs over it, much as had been the case with Ozzy and Never Say Die! at the end of the ‘70s. But at least this time they had the sense to take a decade off.
So there you have it; the checkered career of Tony Martin and Black Sabbath; the right singer at the right time, but with only a certain amount of the right material. Obviously, it’s not a competition, but if you put Martin’s four Black Sabbath albums next to Dio’s four – including the 2009 Black Sabbath by-another-name Heaven & Hell album The Devil You Know – it’s a surprisingly even match. True, no album of the Martin era can hold a candle to Sabbath’s epic Heaven and Hell, but Headless Cross comes closer than is often admitted, and there’s a similar mix of diamonds and dross in both sets of albums. The definitive, carefully considered Martin-era compilation that will make an indestructible case for his legacy still remains to be made, but for the diehards – and what band has more of them? – Anno Domini 1989-1995 puts all of Martin’s wildly lumpy Sabbath oeuvre in one place with the best sound it’s ever had. Ozzy will forever be the voice of Black Sabbath, but as this set confirms, Martin deserves to share a Malphas-like role with the late, great Ronnie James Dio. — spectrumculture.com
435 MB 320 ** FLAC
…set fripperies and ephemera.
Martin’s Black Sabbath career actually started a little earlier than 1989, when he stepped in to re-record the vocals for the band’s ‘87 opus The Eternal Idol after the previous hire, Badlands singer Ray Gillen, proved unsatisfactory. The Eternal Idol has a slightly disjointed quality, and the songs weren’t ideal for Martin’s voice, but that doesn’t matter because it’s not included here, so we start with Martin firmly ensconced in the lead vocalist role. He went on to be the singer and co-songwriter on four more Black Sabbath albums, and presented here in remastered versions, with 1995’s Forbidden – the band’s final album until their reunion with Ozzy almost two decades later – presented in an entirely new Tony Iommi mix. So that makes the box set’s roll call, in reverse order of both chronology and quality, Forbidden, Cross Purposes (1994), Tyr (1990) and, first and foremost, 1989’s epic Headless Cross.
Headless Cross was the sound of a dinosaur awakening after a long period of hibernation, finding itself in a new and unfamiliar landscape and trying to blend in; in other words Black Sabbath with a new sense of purpose. After a storming start to the ‘80s with two powerful, NWOBHM-adjacent classics, Heaven and Hell and the slightly less good Mob Rules, Sabbath hadn’t so much faltered as fallen apart. The should-have-worked Born Again, with its combination of three-quarters of the classic Sabbath lineup plus Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, was a comedy of errors. Graced, appropriately, with one of the worst album covers of all time, it was a lot of fun, but mostly not very good and certainly not at the cutting edge of metal in ’83 as Heaven and Hell had been in 1980. It also cost the band the greatest of rock drummers, Bill Ward, who went into rehab, quitting music for the better part of a decade, and their bassist and main songwriter, Geezer Butler, who would rejoin again with Dio in the early ‘90s. 1986’s Seventh Star with the great Glenn Hughes on vox – another Deep Purple alumnus, not for the last time – is a pretty decent hard rock album, but it doesn’t sound like Black Sabbath — because it wasn’t. A rebranded Iommi solo album, it showed the guitarist trying out a more commercial, MTV approach and why not? But also, why? The Eternal Idol was a little heavier, but essentially arrived after everyone involved, including the fans, had lost interest in it, but Headless Cross was something else. After being impressed by Martin’s voice and professionalism, Iommi invited him to be the band’s singer, and the two Tonys set to work on a series of new songs that were far more Sabbath-like than anything since Mob Rules.
As a statement of intent, the resurrected Black Sabbath opens with “The Gates of Hell,” an effective minute or so of sinister, doom-laden atmospherics, before launching into the title track. The new Black Sabbath was not quite the Sabbath of yore, nor was it a collection of prestigious sessioneers, as with the previous couple of albums. This time round, there were Tony & Tony, keyboard player Geoff Nichols, who had been with the band since the Dio days, and on the drums, Mr Cozy Powell. Powell was – might as well admit it – no Bill Ward, but he was nevertheless an authentic drumming icon – for his work with Jeff Beck, Rainbow, Whitesnake et al, and one who, like Ward, had an identifiable style. A couple of session bassists fill in admirably, and while they aren’t Geezer, they add to the album’s glossy professionalism. But glossy or not, “Headless Cross” is definitely Black Sabbath. Martin had an interest in folklore, mythology, history and the supernatural that was, like Dio’s mysticism, entirely sympathetic to the Sabbath aura. His lyrics, as well as his voice, give his work with the band a distinctive character, and crucially he seemed to coax the most authentically Black Sabbathian riffs in years from Iommi.
All that said, this was a Black Sabbath for the late ‘80s, and from Powell’s thunderous, metronomic beat to the atmospheric synths and soaring chorus, “Headless Cross” is an ‘80s hard rock anthem. Martin’s voice is powerful but superbly controlled, with a clear, dramatic enunciation that breathes life into his evocative, occasionally silly lyrics. His voice is solidly in the mold of the Dio/Glenn Hughes/Joe Lynn Turner rough-smooth rock singer beloved of ‘80s radio, but it’s distinctive and expressive too, and there’s a cheesy kind of magic – but magic nonetheless – in the combination of his soaring voice and Iommi’s characteristically baleful guitar tone. Powell’s pounding drums are superbly recorded, and Powell and Iommi’s always-great production sounds even better in the remaster. “Headless Cross” is great, and so, at least half of the time, is Headless Cross. There’s a lot of good, solid, atmospheric hard rock; songs like “Black Moon” and “Nightwing” – there’s a decent heavy ballad, “When Death Calls,” that features a nice guest solo from Brian May, and there are the best commercial/’80s rock songs that Sabbath ever recorded. “Devil and Daughter” is exhilarating and catchy, while “Kill in the Spirit World,” with its baffling lyrics about ghosts killing each other or something(?) and an unfortunate hint of “Eye of the Tiger,” is even better. More importantly, “Kill…” has a simply phenomenal lead vocal by T Martin that it’s hard to imagine any singer improving on. Check out the second verse that begins “Behold the dead, clutching at fading hands …” – Dio himself couldn’t have belted it out it better.
Though it got the band back on track, Headless Cross is not immune to the slight sense of ludicrousness that has always dogged Black Sabbath. The cover is cool enough if slightly cheap-looking, illogically but somehow typically for the Sabbath world not showing a headless cross but a complete one. The video for the marginally superior single edit of the title track is pure Spinal Tap comedy theater – and therefore great, but … And Martin’s lyrics, though superb and perfectly suited to the Sabbathverse, also feature a cast of angels, demons, spirits and witches, not to mention Satan himself, characters so stereotypically metal that even the band themselves balked a little and would take quite a different tack for their next release, Tyr, which followed in 1990.
The newly confident Black Sabbath returned with Whitesnake bassist Neil Murray completing the lineup and a new mythology-heavy direction that found them entering the new decade somewhat uncertainly. The album looked far classier than its predecessor, presaging the visuals of many a pagan/black metal album later in the decade, and its opening track, “Anno Mundi” is one of the finest and most accomplished of their post-Ozzy career. Heavy but melodic it boasts a mystical atmosphere and a beautifully judged Martin vocal and lyrics that were intriguing as well as melodramatic. It’s exactly what you’d want a more mature, thoughtful Black Sabbath to sound like. But while “Anno Mundi” is great, Tyr itself is only fine. It sounds great, with a fantastically thunderous drum sound – Powell and Iommi produced again – and a nice contrast between heavy guitars and pervasively atmospheric synths, but the material is overall just a little less inspired this time around. The fast songs – like “The Law Maker,” which has a headlong Iron Maiden quality, and the solid “Valhalla” feel a little undistinguished, while the self-consciously epic stuff is a bit stodgy. But “Valhalla”’s extended intro, “Odin’s Court” is lovely, and “The Sabbath Stones” is suitably eerie. There’s also an anomalous kind of hair metal power ballad, “It Feels Good,” which stands out strangely amid the pagan landscapes, but it’s nice enough, even if it feels like a refugee from The Seventh Star.
The next time Black Sabbath reconvened, it was with the Mob Rules lineup, jettisoning Tony Martin, Cozy Powell and any sense of career momentum, instead reuniting with Geezer, Dio and Vinnie Appice. The sour, harsh attendant album, Dehumanizer is surely few people’s favorite Black Sabbath record, and so when Dio and Appice quit after touring, Martin again received the call and, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to rejoin the band. Geezer was still onboard, but Powell wasn’t, so the band called in yet another Rainbow alumnus, Bobby Rondinelli, to occupy the drumming stool. Cross Purposes is perhaps the worst and most shrug-inducing Black Sabbath album title of them all, but the album itself is an advance on Dehumanizer, though somewhat in the same “modern” mold. Quality-wise it’s in the same league as Tyr; solid-to-good, even if it lacks a song of the magnitude of “Anno Mundi.” The album is blessed, even in its remastered version, with a slightly trebly drum and vocals sound compared to its predecessors, but the guitars and bass are urgent and heavy. “I Witness” is a decent, energetic opener, but frustratingly it threatens an epic chorus that never quite arrives, and instead its best feature is some unusually modern, semi-dissonant Iommi chords among the riffage.
The album has its highlights; “Cross of Thorns” is angry and heavy, with just a hint of the grandeur that Martin was capable of, and “Virtual Death” shows Black Sabbath convincingly reclaiming the doom genre they invented. Still, although the impression the album leaves is pretty good, there are more characterless songs than one would like; “Psychophobia” sounds like a supercharged version of Whitesnake’s “Still of the Night,” but with none of its cheesy soulfulness, “Immaculate Deception” has a funky guitar riff ,but no Bill Ward to transmute it into gold and no real tune. As if to highlight the band’s slight lack of identity, Eddie Van Halen pops up to shred on the closing “Evil Eye,” and it doesn’t sound as out of place as you’d hope EVH might sound on a Sabbath record. Cross Purposes does grow with repeated listens, but it’s generally a bit drab and a lot of noise for not much return so there’s no huge incentive to stick with it unless you’re a fan, despite the many good bits. For this reissue, the Japan-only track “What’s the Use” has been added. It’s quite fast. Actually, it’s not bad, being oddly Dio-like lyrics-wise; but mostly, it’s quite fast.
There was clearly no way that the band could make two consecutive albums with the same lineup, so for their swansong-for-a-bit, Forbidden, they reunited the Tyr lineup again, bringing Neil Murray and Cozy back from limbo. The album itself sounds more like Dehumanizer than Tyr though, and to exacerbate its perceived issues, Iommi hired Body Count’s Ernie C to produce and invited Ice-T to contribute to its lead track “The Illusion of Power.” Perceived issues, because much of the album’s critical failure – not just critical, the band hated it too – have been laid at Ernie C’s door. But if that was true, the new, Iommi-approved Forbidden would be fantastic, and is it? Well. Firstly, the album has never been as bad as its reputation suggests anyway – it’s easily as good as Cross Purposes for example – and, secondly, if you really didn’t like it before, you still really won’t like it now. The Iommi mix definitely has a better, less tinny drum sound and is a little fuller overall, but otherwise the album is much as it was. That is, there are gestures toward something a bit different, heavier and more modern, notably on the faintly ridiculous “Illusion of Power” and the jagged title track, but the best songs are mostly those like “Sick and Tired” that hark back to the Headless Cross sound in all its corny-edged glory. Neither Ernie C or Iommi’s production seems quite to show Martin at his best, so presumably it’s the songs that are at fault, but he’s great on “Forbidden” and “Sick and Tired” and very good elsewhere. In fact, the album’s biggest impediment isn’t the production or the performances but the general atmosphere of weary unoriginality that hangs over it, much as had been the case with Ozzy and Never Say Die! at the end of the ‘70s. But at least this time they had the sense to take a decade off.
So there you have it; the checkered career of Tony Martin and Black Sabbath; the right singer at the right time, but with only a certain amount of the right material. Obviously, it’s not a competition, but if you put Martin’s four Black Sabbath albums next to Dio’s four – including the 2009 Black Sabbath by-another-name Heaven & Hell album The Devil You Know – it’s a surprisingly even match. True, no album of the Martin era can hold a candle to Sabbath’s epic Heaven and Hell, but Headless Cross comes closer than is often admitted, and there’s a similar mix of diamonds and dross in both sets of albums. The definitive, carefully considered Martin-era compilation that will make an indestructible case for his legacy still remains to be made, but for the diehards – and what band has more of them? – Anno Domini 1989-1995 puts all of Martin’s wildly lumpy Sabbath oeuvre in one place with the best sound it’s ever had. Ozzy will forever be the voice of Black Sabbath, but as this set confirms, Martin deserves to share a Malphas-like role with the late, great Ronnie James Dio. — spectrumculture.com
mike146
Jun 15, 2024, 8:43:12 AMJun 15
to zeptrade
sorry...count me as one of the DIO fans here...i always felt that his work in the sabbath camp was his best, then Rainbow, then solo. I have always been a fan of the first 2 albums in this set and not so much the second 2. Also, might as well finish the back handing...I also thought the tracks with Ray Gillen were superior as well. That being said, I do stand by Headless Cross and TYR as being excellent albums and can stand with any other Sabbath album.
And of course, the real reason for writing, thank you for the fantastic share!!!!
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