Born Again (Black Sabbath album)
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| Label (s) | Vertigo | |||
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Title (number) |
9 |
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running time |
41min 4s |
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Black Sabbath, Robin Black |
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Studio (s) |
Manor Studios, Shipton-on-Cherwell, England |
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Chart positions Explanation of the data |
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Born Again is a music album by British heavy metal band Black Sabbath from 1983. It is the only album by the band with Ian Gillan as the singer .
Emergence
Singer Ronnie James Dio left Black Sabbath in early 1983. Band manager Don Arden asked Ian Gillan, who was a singer with Deep Purple until 1973 and who had disbanded his band Gillan in late 1982. At first he refused, but later agreed after going to a pub in a drunk state, later according to his own statements mainly for financial reasons. On April 6, 1983, Black Sabbath announced the entry of Gillan during a press conference in a London nightclub. Founding member Bill Ward replaced his successor Vinnie Appice on drums .
Due to the new engagement, Gillan postponed a scheduled vocal cord surgery and began to rehearse with the band. In May 1983, recording began at Manor Studios . After graduation, Gillan went on vacation and left the other band members to mix and finish the album. He received 20 copies of the finished album and got so angry about the result that he smashed all 20 albums. In his opinion, the album cover was gross and the sound of the album was destroyed in the mix.
The record cover designed by Steve "Krusher" Joule shows a screaming red baby with long fingernails, fangs and horns. The often negatively received cover was created, as Joule explains, under "extraordinary circumstances" in the wake of the conflict between the band and their original singer Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon , the daughter of Black Sabbath's manager Don Arden. Since Joule also designed Osbourne's record sleeves at that time and didn't want to risk it, Joule decided to go for ridiculous designs for Black Sabbath. The picture of the baby that he found in a magazine was overexposed by him, provided with horns, long fingernails and fangs, changed in color and the English Fraktur font "bastardized". While Joule said he had to giggle at the illustration, Don Arden liked it.
tour
On the subsequent tour , drummer Ward was replaced by Bev Bevan because of alcohol problems . According to an idea by Geezer Butler, the stage design should consist of a faithful replica of Stonehenge , but due to its size this was only used in full for a few shows. In the style of the cover, a dwarf was hung above the replica, which was supposed to fall onto the backdrop with a chime of the bell, while roadies disguised as druids entered the stage. However, the doll fell so miserably during the first show that it could no longer be found.
Track list
- Trashed
- Stonehenge
- Disturbing the Priest
- The Dark
- Zero the Hero
- Digital bitch
- Born again
- Hot line
- Keep it warm
Music style and lyrics
Adrien Gründand of PopMatters describes Born Again as a “strange, eclectic mixture of seven songs - without counting two time-filling instrumentals - ranging from fun rock 'n' roll to blues- soaked ballads and strange excursions into atonality to what is probably the heaviest song that Black Sabbath has ever recorded, ”was enough. He described the mix as "absolutely catastrophic, a muddy mess" for which three of the members blamed each other.
Trashed is a piece with a high tempo, according to Greg Moffitt of Decibel Magazine musically in the manner of Neon Knights and Turn up the Night , but lyrically a clear break with the Dio era. The song is about a weekend at Manor Studios in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire, where Born Again was recorded, and while drunk, Gillan wrecked Ward's car in an accident while driving around the property. The European and North American tour programs include a photograph of the burning Ford Granada .
Stonehenge is an instrumental piece that, with its atmospheric synthesizers and eerie effects, is probably mainly the work of longtime keyboardist Geoff Nicholls .
Disturbing the Priest is lyrically a traditional Black Sabbath song and builds up atmosphere in a similar way to Black Sabbath by creating and releasing tension . Ian Gillan took the melody of the singing verse from the title track of his 1977 album Scarabus .
The Dark is a short instrumental piece with a heavy bass, followed by the song Zero the Hero . On this one, Tony Iommi uses riffs in a way that, according to Moffitt, has not been heard since the sabotage ; his extended guitar solo is underlined by Butler's bass playing.
The B-side begins, similar to the A-side, with the energetic piece of Digital Bitch . The text is said to have been inspired by Sharon Arden / Osbourne. This is followed by the quieter song Born Again , which is not an anti-religious piece, as the title might suggest. Hot Line stands out again for Iommi's riffs and Gillan's screaming vocals. The last track, Keep It Warm , is like Trashed at the beginning of the A-side more anchored in the "real world" and was dedicated to Gillan's girlfriend at the time, Bron.
reception
The album received a divided response when it was released. Many viewed it as "a complete mess", but enough copies were sold to get into the top 5 in the UK, and in the US it almost hit the top 40. Opponents called the band with Deep Purple singer Gillan as "Deep Sabbath" and responded with skepticism to him as a substitute for Dio. Many older followers preferred the previous Black Sabbath albums, while younger ones turned to other bands. In the opinion of Deep Purple biographer Dave Thompson, a supergroup was created with the involvement of Ian Gillan , which was actually only intended as a "super money printing machine", because Black Sabbath was to be regarded as dissolved at the time. Neil Nixon writes in the Rough Guide to Rock that the sound of the album was good, but the quality of the songs was not so good that the line-up with Gillan would have had a chance. Eduardo Rivadavia from Allmusic complains that Gillan's bluesy voice and humor do not go well with the band's music. The bad record cover and the problems on the tour as well as the Stonehenge stage design were the perfect template for the comedy film This Is Spinal Tap . In his review, Walter Scheurer from the online magazine metal.de says in retrospect that the album "is still one of the band's criminally underestimated works" and that the bad reviews are due to the lack of acceptance of the new line-up. With Zero the Hero and Disturbing the Priest , two of the band's classics are featured on the album. In fact, Zero the Hero was later covered by Cannibal Corpse . Greg Moffitt of Decibel Magazine also regards the two tracks as classics and defends Born Again in the Justify Your Shitty Taste section ; It is not a great work, but is memorable and extremely heavy despite the production, and he can endure a slight cloudiness rather than an emasculated perfection. In his view, the worst thing to say about Born Again is that it plunged Ward into alcoholism again, but that's another story. Martin Popoff led it at number 83 in his 2004 book The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time . The Rolling Stone originally gave the album two stars, but increased it to three in 2004. PopMatters' Adrien Gründand ignored Born Again and Black Sabbath at the time of release, but described the release in 2011 as "the last great Black Sabbath record". The album was never re-released in the US, while a double-CD re-release was released in the UK in 2011.
Re-release and remix
Tony Iommi reveals in an interview conducted for the music magazine Classic Rock that he intends to remix "Born Again". It would have sounded great in the studio. There would have been problems with the pressing. But the original tapes have disappeared in the environment of the ex-manager Don Arden. Only about 5 songs were found, the rest was lost.
literature
- Dave Thompson: Smoke on the Water: The Deep Purple Story . ECW Press, 2004, ISBN 978-1-55022-618-8 , pp. 233-239 .
Web links
- Born Again at Allmusic (English)
- Information about the album ( Memento from July 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) on black-sabbath.com (English)
Individual evidence
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↑ Chart placements:
- Born Again in the Official UK Charts (English)
- Born Again on the US Billboard 200
- ^ A b Thompson: Smoke on the Water , p. 234.
- ^ Thompson: Smoke on the Water , p. 235.
- ↑ Depeche Mode used the same motif as the cover for the maxi single New Life in 1981 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Greg Moffitt: Justify Your Shitty Taste - Black Sabbath's “Born Again” ( Memento of the original from July 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ^ Thompson: Smoke on the Water , p. 236.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Adrien Founded: Born Again, Again , August 2, 2011, accessed October 27, 2012.
- ^ Neil Nixon: Black Sabbath . In: Peter Buckley (Ed.): The Rough Guide to Rock . Rough Guides, 2003, ISBN 978-1-84353-105-0 , pp. 103 .
- ^ Walter Scheurer: Black Sabbath - Born Again - Review. metal.de, accessed on April 29, 2010 .
- ↑ Dave Ling2019-02-19T10: 42: 31Z Classic Rock: Tony Iommi: the gospel according to The Dark Lord. Accessed March 31, 2019 .
