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BLACK SABBATH: BEYOND METAL (A JAZZ ODYSSEY)

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EVER HEARD BLACK SABBATH SOUND LIKE THIS?

On July 6th, the day after Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning sign-off at Villa Park, Stuart Maconie broadcast a Sabbath special Freakzone on BBC Radio 6 Music.

It was an inspired slab of radio – a wild selection of Black Sabbath covers, bands inspired by Sabbath and, of course, Sabbath originals. But it was the covers that really made it work because none of them were rock or metal. Not a single one.

Instead there was fictional jazz (eh?), medieval folk, Ethiopian brassy scuzz, Scandi-fied indie pop, contemporary classical and plenty more … countless left turns in a fascinating trip that hints at just how far and wide Black Sabbath reached.

The programme is no longer available on BBC Sounds but, because it’s too good not to rave about, here are a few words on some of the tracks that blew my tiny mind, followed by the tracklist for your fullest explorations.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne. Long live the Summer of Sabbath.

Far beyond metal

What, no guitar? Better get used to it with French/Ethiopian hybrid uKanDanZ because they lead into War Pigs with a screaming sax blast and it RIPS. After that, they lock down a tough keys-bass-drums groove punctured with brassy bursts.

Soreng Santi throws out a very loose take on Iron Man. It’s a track that’s always lumbered in the best possible way but here the sticky fuzziness of the riff stumbles and wavers and just about stays upright. In contrast, the drums dance with clarity and full command of spacial awareness. If you watched White Lotus, this track appeared in an episode somewhere. Apparently.

Hearing some radical reworks of Paranoid makes you realise that the chugging riff captures the paranoia of the title – it’s a bit nervy, edgy, restless. Take that signature element away and the song can be transformed, as Black Bossa Sabbath Nova show with a gentle, swinging shuffle that glides so smoothly it barely touches ground. Beautiful vocal too.

Sticking with Paranoid, Hellsongs do a similarly non-monolithic breakdown. Like Susanna and the Magic Orchestra’s minimalist, heartbreaking version of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Hellsongs strip a robust original down to its barest essence and redress it lightly – here with whispered gusts and string-backed Americana. Hellsongs Paranoid is roomy and calm, the very opposite of Sabbath’s anxious riffing. And while we’re on a Paranoid reimagined trip, check Type O Negative’s version for a transcendent goth metal overhaul.

If the idea of Jazz Sabbath (listed below) excites more than the lighter-touch music delivers then Iron Man by The Bad Plus is the place to get a proper jazz-does-Sabbath experience. THIS is jazz Sabbath. Piano chords take the place of Iommi’s riff, the tempo is slowed a fraction and the inventive combined muso talent makes more notes, more melodies and more dimensions without ever losing the heavy essence of the original.

Keeping it jazz, Brad Meldhau‘s Sabbath is not a cover but a tribute. Doom piano and shit-hot drumwork conspire to fashion a downer earworm from Sweet Leaf’s cloud. Bulletproof and nicely weighty.

At the risk of turning this into a jazz odyssey, the final highlight – for now – is more jazz. From a metal legend. War Pigs by The Alex Skolnick Trio. Swingy as fuck. Do not expect Testament-al thrash riffage. Do expect clean, warm tones, sublime phrasing, blistering jazz runs and a drum masterclass … how much musicality? Unreal.

As promised, below is the full Freakzone tracklist minus the Black Sabbath originals. Sleep and Electric Wizard are familiar enough but all the covers here are, to me, a new adventure and every single track is worth checking. Credit to Stuart Maconie for putting it together – radio at its best.

Let the Black Sabbath story continue.

Freakzone: Black Sabbath Special

Cindy und Bert – Der Hund Von Baskerville. Ultra catchy German pop-psyche Paranoid via Haight Ashbury

Les Baxter – Main Title (from the film, Black Sabbath)

uKanDanZ – War Pigs. See above

Jazz Sabbath – Electric Funeral. Soft shuffle and brushes from Adam Wakeman’s invented concept. If the nightcap fits… drink it. Late-night bar vibes

Rondellus – Rotae Confusions. Wheels of Confusion, sung in Latin, haunting and medieval

Soreng Santi – Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng. See above

Vitamin String Quartet – Into the Void. Strings, innit?

Cardigans – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Light and dreamy retro drift-pop with incredibly cool funk drums. Genteel detachment you can almost dance to.

Black Bossa Sabbath Nova – Paranoid, see above

Sleep – Holy Mountain. No description required

Apocalyptica – Spiral Architect. Full bodied orchestral instrumental

Hellsongs – Paranoid, see above

Brad Meldhau – Sabbath, ditto

The Bad Plus – Iron Man, ditto ditto

Electric Wizard – Funeralopolis. See Sleep above

Free Nelson Mandoomjazz – Black Sabbath. Melancholy sax, horror scream squall sax, max-tension dynamics – this song was destined to be doomjazzed

Meatdripper – Homegrown. Blackened stoner with Pigsx7 slam riffage and questionable vox, you decide

Alex Skolnick Trio – War Pigs, see above and listen and weep

Black Sabbath Vol 4
Back to the Beginning, back to the font: Vol 4

A WORD FOR OZZY

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This post was meant to be a celebration of Black Sabbath‘s monumental Back to the Beginning metal-thon and all the Sabbathian goodness and rekindled love it inspired. Who hasn’t been on a Sabbath bender of late?

Following huge media coverage of Glastonbury and Oasis in the previous few days, Back to the Beginning could not have been timed better: the festival spirit was already overflowing but this time, July 5th, it was for heavy rock and metal. The historic aspect of BTTB was never in doubt but once you got into it and started watching and reading more about it, it really sunk in just how big a deal this actually was.

It was on-stage closure for the people who started it – in their home city, supported by the bands who drew on their influence and came back to pay tribute. Poignancy played a huge part in all this. It was so much more than a final gig by a legendary band. It was a moment that will go down as one of the great events in rock.

Then Ozzy passed away just days later. And it’s knocked everything sideways.

Instead of being a celebration of music and legacy, Back to the Beginning has rapidly become something else – not just a send-off for a band but a send-off for a life, too. No wonder our thoughts have stalled and become blurred … it’s too fast a transition from loved-up afterglow into shock. In some ways, Black Sabbath have been pushed a little further back within the memory of this event and Ozzy – understandably, right now – is up front and centre. We’re in Ozzy mode.

Unlike Black Sabbath’s back catalogue, Ozzy’s solo music isn’t enough my thing, despite some awesome tunes. But his OTT Hammy-horror videos and album covers, shred-glam guitar sounds and widescreen wild man personality were so integral to growing up in the 80s that it might as well be. He helped define what rock sounded like in that decade and for anyone who spent time programming the video recorder for The Power Hour, Raw Power and Noisy Mothers in the deep, dark small hours on ITV, Ozzy was inescapable. We grew up with him. We knew and got to know the musicians he picked. We knew the bands he toured with. He’s always been there, a connector of souls.

The only Ozzy records in my stash* are Tribute and the Just Say Ozzy live EP so they’re being revisited right now. Suicide Solution and I Don’t Know always, always work. Records like this are inseparable from teenage memories, even down to the way they feel – the Tribute record cover is oddly grainy.

Funny to think that Geezer Butler played on Just Say Ozzy. The rotation and crossover of band members in the post-70s Sabbath/Ozzy orbit blows your mind, as does Ozzy’s ultimately short-sighted approach towards playing his former band’s tracks. In the sleeve notes, he wrote, “The Sabbath songs – to have recorded them one last time with Geezer Butler, Zakk and Randy, says it all for me. It’s a chapter of my life I can now close.”

That was 1990. But the chapter didn’t close – not until July 2025.

Farewell, Ozzy Osbourne.

*adding a couple of CDs now though. Diary of a Madman and No Rest for the Wicked are the chosen ones

Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads - Tribute album cover
Double tribute

JEHNNY BETH – Obsession: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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RAW INDUSTRIALS FROM BETH, BLACK METAL FROM EGYPT AND … A VIDEO OF GLOWING SHOELACES

It’s been a big few weeks for big names and big media coverage. Glastonbury dominated the BBC but if you weren’t screen-bound at the time Neil Young actually played, his set remains elusive bar whatever scraps you can sweep up from YouTube (here’s an Old Man clip that’s quietly hypnotic despite – no, because of – being filmed miles away from the stage from by someone who totally gets it… thank you BrainRotRebellion. Great laces).

As if Glastonbury all over wasn’t big enough, Oasis got us giddy for communal anthems less than a week later and then BLACK FCKN SABBATH reunited for a celebratory all-star last-ever show at Villa Park: Back to the Beginning. Massive. Sabbath are dominating the sounds round here but, to balance all that enormity and nostalgia, here are some new tunes – and it’s a noisier bunch this month.

Converge have not put out anything new but Mary Anne Hobbs played the ferocious Dark Horse on her new Sunday evening 6 Music show last month. Why? Seems that Jehnny Beth is a fan – and Hobbs had just given Obsession its first ever radio play.

Unsurprisingly, Beth aces it. Obsession grabs the wracked emotions and desperate aggression of early Nine Inch Nails and makes fresh industrial chaos for 2025 – here’s the video and her new album You Heartbreaker, You is out in August. Obsession bodes very well.

Meanwhile … Manchester for Maruja, anyone?

MARUJA – Look Down On Us

For Maruja first-timers, like what I is, Look Down On Us starts out like punk-noise bass with sax and rage. So far, so grit. But there’s more to it as this is a track (and video) of many parts, moods and movements, where anger slows to calm, calm swells to hope, and hope gets hit with headbanger intensity and a squalling free-form crescendo. Explosive, cathartic and very possibly ascendant, no doubt this is a beast when played live. Video right here.

STRATFORD RISE – Gunshow

Can you call this stuff prog? It’s two and a half minutes short so probably not. But then again, length isn’t everything … is it? In Gunshow, Belfast’s Stratford Rise mangle blackmidi/Geordie Greep quirk into a dense, churning chunk of artsy metallics that doesn’t quite go where you think – and stops before you find out.

WITCHCRAFT – Burning Cross

Very timely, given the music retirement news of the moment – a pure retro crawl from a descendant of a descendant of Black Sabbath. Absolutely nothing about Burning Cross screams ‘2025’. Nothing screams ‘summer heatwave’ either, but this Witchcraft tune is definitely at the quality end of any Sabbath devotion you might stumble on, especially the non-metal (jazzier?) breaks and ever so slightly stank-face wah. Check it here and file away for some appropriate autumn drizzle.

LYCOPOLIS – Mesektet

Feeling the need for raw dirt? An anti slick fix, a hot shot of sonic filth? This’ll do it. Sounding like it was recorded inside a tomb, Mesektet by Egyptian black metallers Lycopolis does to black metal what Entombed did to death metal – gives it swagger, gives it groove, gives it fucking ROLL. Atmos conjured, arrestingly unique.

TAKKAK TAKKAK – Garang

Cultures clash, but which ones? Who knows. Percussion-heavy chants and beats make for an underground cult where the ancient and the modern mix it up while metallic one-chord chugs pin you down. Subterranean club music, without borders, outside of time, impossible to describe. A spirited antidote to barriers and boundaries. Take a hit of Garang from Takkak Takkak and make your own mind up.

BLEETH – Echoes of Doubt

Bass alert: prepare to be steamrollered. Echoes of Doubt employs an absolute wall of it to bulk up its post-desert stoner anthemics so if you’re partial to the late Caleb Scofield’s four-string MO for Zozobra and Cave In, Bleeth are worthy. With thick, catchy riffs, super melodic vocals and a neat little tempo pick up, what more do you need for the summer?

’til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind

HAIRY MONSTERS & SUNNO))) CREEPS

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HALLOWEEN….IT’S TIME

Deathly greetings all, how’s your horror-themed listening going . . . what’s that? Not got started? I feel your unfeeling zombie pain, my friend. It’s those pesky midweek Halloweens, isn’t it? Tuesday, my arse.  

What we need is a perky goth-metal pick-me-up and that’s exactly what’s lined up

in a blog somewhere that actually knows what it’s doing.

In other words, not here. We’ll be gearing up for halloweenery high jinks with joyless, beatless bleakness.

Sorry. It’s SUNN O))).

SUNN O))) – A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You

Dare you to sit on your own at night and listen to this from start to end. Not as background, not in daylight, not while cooking or doom scrolling, none of that. Just you. And this. For 15 and a half minutes.

[note: the White1 CD booklet lies. It lists the track as 15’ 36” but in reality it crawls past that marker for two more whole minutes which, in SUNN O))) world, feels like three weeks.] 

White1 is the album where SUNN O))) went prog, I guess. It’s avant drone metal gone batshit crazy with a wild collection of (very occasional) beats, guest voices, swathes of un-monolithic ambience and – wash your eyes, drone fiends – teeny fragments of clean guitar. 

Being an avid Julian Cope fan, I first heard of SUNN O))) through his Head Heritage site where he’d wax hyper lyrical about them alongside Sleep, Khanate, Comets on Fire and too many other freakouts to count, convincing my clueless but curious self to pursue some of these subterranean sonic explorations. So, when White1 came out, it was the no-brainer SUNN O))) entry point, mostly because Cope himself was on it. The Drude was the safety net. 

That track, My Wall, is a stupendous 20-minute tidal surge of low frequency fog ‘n drift that begins the album. Cope’s lengthy ode takes in Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Thor, Death, Ragnarok and more on his poetic voyage, and even SUNN O))) themselves (‘Play your gloom axe Stephen O’ Malley…sub bass clinging to the side of the valley’) get namechecked as Cope sermonises over death-knell riffs and tremorbass vibrations. ‘tis a magnificent gloomer and a genuine Halloween playlister.

But we’re not really here to talk about My Wall (much). Nor are we swinging on the offset hinges of The Gates of Ballard.  

No, this Halloween we’re hanging with SUNN O)))’s biggest sonic experiment to date at that point: White1’s closing track, A Shaving of the Horn that Speared You. 

Spooked the shite out of me on first play.

Admittedly, in hindsight, the conditions were possibly less than ideal. At the tail end of a monster Sunday hangover, it did seem like a good idea to check this brand new album in the end-of-weekend deadzone. So, lying on the floor of a basement bedsit in Hammersmith, headache fading, White1 went on and My Wall lulled.

Fell asleep.

Woke up in panic to deathly exhales, forlorn chimes and backwards, fuck-knows-what effects, terrified because it was all too horribly unsettling and disorienting. That was this, A Shaving of the Horn. It has haunted me ever since. 

Sure, heard in full consciousness and/or daylight, it’s not that extreme. In fact, it’s not extreme at all, especially two decades of drone-and-noise exposure later, but there lies
SUNN O)))’s grasp of atmosphere and future vision. The trademark oppression-by-force is gone. There is no feedback, riff or gloom axe. Instead there’s texture, intense space and undead vocalisms with vibrations that hum and swell. Fragments of orthodoxy – like a clean guitar strike – evade your touch as they warp and dissolve. It’s like you’ve been knocked unconscious and abducted, only to come round in some massive, living slow-breathing tomb while people outside ‘fix’ things.   

Groaning and oozing. Death breaths. Things that should be inanimate but aren’t. This is what the track conjures. No climax, no payoff, no sudden death ending, nothing but a slo-mo creep masterclass. Dance to THAT, Tuesday Halloweeners.

PREDICTABLE FALSE ENDING ALERT

We need at least one gasp of light relief after all that nightmare psychedelia, so how about sticking this on your playlist? Old-school wormhole guaranteed to follow.

BLACK SABBATH – The Shining

Think ‘80s Sabbath’ and you might think Dio. Fair enough, but that was all over by 1982. Really, it’s the Tony Martin years that best define Sabbath metal in the 80s and The Shining has it all: killer riff, soaring vocal hook, nailed-to-1987 keyboards and posturing videos with dry ice and windswept women with birds. Lots of Tony crosses too. Extra points here for Martin’s un-Sabbath fashion sense … but then again, all of Sabbath was un-Sabbath by this point. Rocking tune, ripe for a Halloween replay. Rise up!  

Need another scorching cold Halloween selection? Check this Type O Negative goth downer

HALLOWEEN: PARANOID AND NEGATIVE

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TYPE O NEGATIVE SLOW DOWN A SABBATH CLASSIC

Of all the seminal heavyweight scare-alls you could choose for a Halloween soundtrack, you’d be hard pushed to choose chillier than Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath from Black Sabbath – not just the slowest, most-ominous anti-groove put to tape at that point in heavy rock’s short history, but a track that’s got the imagery to match: the Hammer-horror dread that Ozzy conjures in your shitting-it mind and, of course, the spectral Presence on the album’s cover.

But despite all that, we’re not picking Black Sabbath the track for a Halloween playlist, not this year. 2014 belongs to PARANOID.

I’ve never much liked it.

Easily the least essential of Iommi and co’s anthems, it stands supremely un-tall against Sabba-manna like Wheels of Confusion, Fairies Wear Boots, Hole in the Sky and the like. No-one, surely no-one, would pick Paranoid’s pop-metal bounce ahead of any of those.

But what if it was slower – like, a LOT slower?

Or blacker – like, none-more-Tap blacker?

Or deader – like, graveyard undeader?

Cue Type O Negative.

If ever a band embodied the Halloween aesthetic and staked it with wry gallows’ humour, Type O are it. Halloween in Heaven, Black No.1, Bloody Kisses and All Hallows Eve are literal enough links but really, any track of theirs from Bloody Kisses onwards that’s not thrash-fast is pretty much game – Suspended in Dusk, Everyone I Love is Dead, Haunted, The Profit of Doom, take your pick. You get the gist.

But it’s the realm of the cover version that pulls everything together today. The band have got form in this area, lending the Negative touch to Neil Young, the Beatles, Hendrix and – most perversely/brilliantly – to 70s harmony-pop smash Summer Breeze, dragging the Seals and Crofts/Isley Brothers classic from sunshine floater to a slow-low-lower hot sticky trudge.

And so it is with Paranoid, stuck on the end of the faux-live pisstake Origin of the Feces.

Hypnosis-slow, lavishly arranged and knowingly soaked in trademark vampiric goth, Brooklyn’s least celebrated give Sabbath’s 3-minute chugger a makeover so total and so Type O that they absolutely own it: seven luxuriant minutes of pure Para-satisfaction, making it feel like the first time all over again.

Sneak a bit of Iron Man’s downward bender of a riff into the mid-section and you’ve not just got a top Sabbath tribute and a ‘ween classic for the rest of time.

You’ve got one of the best metal cover versions EVER.

*recorded in 1994, it’s 20 years cold!!!! Dig it out from post-94 issues of Origin of the Feces.

**for a few more soundtracks from the dark side, have a quick look at last year’s Halloween list