Friday, 26 January 2018

Black Label Society - Grimmest Hits, album review



Hot Stew and Limoncello

I do like this for its pulverising persistence and occasional Zakk Wylde ballad where prettiness is not by contrast and carried on such macho beauty. There are plenty of Sabbath/Ozzy echoes in the vocal and the riffs [check out the pulsing strut on Bury Your Sorrow], and this is no surprise considering their working together, that’s Wylde and Osbourne, and Wylde’s tribute band Zakk Sabbath. But Black Label Society is distinctive enough, and beyond its heavy metal tropes, with scorching guitar solos and effects to modernise. All That Once Shined is grunged to much heavy sweetness and this leads in to the first blackened croon of ballad The Only Words which then leads to the Room of Nightmares where heaviness reasserts itself. Just another note on the other ballad The Day That Heaven Had Gone Away – like the guitar work and vocal harmonies here. The whole album is like a basic but hotly spiced stew with limoncello aperitif breaks. 


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