lista zespołów Heavy Metal Black Sabbath Mob Rules

I would like to start off by giving a big fuck you to Rolling Stones...no, not the band, the magazine, who gave this one star, calling it "dull-witted" and "flatulent." It's another powerful album from the category of Heaven and Hell. Geezer and Tony play as skillfully as ever, and the dark-pen of Geezer is at his best with the lyrics. Here we see the addition of Vinnie Appice to the quartet replacing the disenfranchised Bill Ward (showing that this is even less Black Sabbath than Heaven and Hell had been).

But that does not make this album as terrible as Rolling Stones said it was. Though, definitely, the feel of this album is more like something we will find later on Dio's solo material, it is still strong as ever. Lyrically, it has even less to do with demons than Heaven and Hell did. But it proves that Dio can sing about whatever he wants and it still sounded bad-ass.

Okay, here we go, into Mob Rules. "Turn Up the Night" is mid-paced, but still strong and, behold, Tony Iommi is playing through the dreaded wah pedal. Well, he's still producing amazing sound from his guitar, so it definitely works. "Southern Cross" was the Heaven and Hell song I liked before I even liked Dio. The clean intro is perfect, and once it hits the ground with the full band, we hear another epic that feels like it is from another place and time. That is something I always love about Dio: he could take you away into another time and place with that voice of his. Any detraction would be that it never goes faster than mid-pace, but that's okay with me, I like long songs.

The title track is another political track, reminiscent of the older Sabbath material. Tony Iommi showcases once again his amazing talent with guitar riffs and solos (keep in mind, that he's doing this with two fingers and two prosthetic fingers. Just the mere fact that he is able to keep doing this for so many years proved that he is definitely one of the great guitar heroes of our time).

Now we come to my favorite Heaven and Hell song of all time: "Falling off the Edge of the World." It begins slow with a guitar arpeggio and strings played over Dio's hair-raising vocals, then booms into life with Geezer's bass and a line that sounds straight out of a King Arthur legend ("I should be at the table round/A servant of the crown."). It takes a little while to warm up, but once the song gets heavy, you'll be glad you waited. Tony Iommi's riff is perhaps my favorite of all his riffs, even of the great riffage of the Sabbath years. Of course, the solo is as epic as usual, and Dio's vocals kick major ass. The interesting story is that I fell in love with this song from the Live at Radio City CD, when Dio was in the later years of his career and his voice was not as strong as it had once been...and still loved it (In my opinion, the riff is good as it is, but sounds even a thousand times more kick-ass in D-tuning).

In conclusion, there isn't a bad song on this album. The bad part is that this was not only the beginning of a very long hiatus for Heaven and Hell, but also the beginning of The End for Black Sabbath (not counting the Reunion). I've watched interviews from the band members, and though Dio said the producer was drunk when he told Geezer and Tony that Dio and Vinnie were fucking with the mix, Dio's little statement of "When it comes time for the vocal, nobody tells me what to do. Nobody! Because they're not as good as me, so I do what I want to do," is unforgivable. But that's all in the past, and the band obviously settled their differences, since they came back for a third and fourth album (as we shall see later on). In short, Mob Rules is a decent album. It may not be as perfect as Heaven and Hell, but "dull-witted" and "flatulent" are more befitting of the Norwegian underground black metal scene than a titan of heavy metal like Black Sabbath/Heaven and Hell.