fartzarellah's Full Review: Black Box: The Complete Original Black Sabbath 197...
Damn it, damn it, damn it! I did not want to buy this thing. I held off for nearly, uh, two months or something. But then, one day, a good friend told me that the remastered version of Vol. IV "kicks @ss!!" And I was like "waahhhh!! wahhhh! I wann it!" So, even though I already own all of the Ozzy-Sabbath albums on CD and never ever needed to ever ever listen to them ever again (especially since I saturated my brain with Sabbath when I wrote my master's thesis, and re-saturated when I wrote reviews of all of their albums for this site), I plunked down eighty frickin' dollars!!!@@##$ to buy it. Ugh. I guess I'm a fan or something.
"So, what's in the box?" you say. "It's a dead cat." I answer. Actually, probably something more like a dead bat, or a beheaded dove, or the ashen remains of burning bodies, or an ounce of weed, or a gram of cocaine, or maybe even a 7th advent unicorn, a crystal ball, or some ice cold fingers running through your brain. More precisely:
-All of the Ozzy-Sabbath albums (Black Sabbath through Never Say Die!).
-An 80 page booklet with a svelt velvet cover, containing rare (and not so rare) photos of the band and an "I've heard it all before" history, mainly consisting of Tony Iommi interviews.
-A "Bonus" (?) DVD of the band performing in 1971, just four songs, one of which is "Blue Suede Shoes" (!)
As mentioned before, I've already reviewed all of these albums so there is not much more for me to say. Comparing the sound quality of the un-remastered CDs to the CDs here I noticed maybe just a little tiny bit of difference here and there but then again, maybe not. Really, there is no huge difference. In particular, Technical Ecstasy is still an over-produced nightmare and Never Say Die! still sounds like it was recorded in an aluminum foil chicken shack. The production crew did nothing (at least, I can't tell if they did) to fix the mix of any of the albums. The thing that ticked me off the most was that "Killing Yourself to Live" and "Looking For Today" on Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath still sound at a much lower volume than the rest of the songs on the disc. Those are precisely the types of problems that remastering is supposed to fix, or so I thought. Hmmmphh.
On to the booklet. What does it say? Nothing new. Any Sabbath fan dedicated enough to buy this already knows about the band's origins, the trouble with drugs, Ozzy getting fired, so on and so forth. All of the pics are in black and white, and most can be found floating around the internet. What I should have done, really!, instead of buying this would have been to have made my very own Sabbath booklet and sold it to people for 30 bucks a pop.
The booklet also includes all of the lyrics (with the exception of the song "Warning" from Black Sabbath). I read somewhere that this is now to be considered the "definitive" lyric sheet. Just what that means is hard to tell. The lyrics do make sense and all, but in many cases the phonetics simply do not match up with what Ozzy seems to be singing on the CDs. So, maybe Ozzy screwed up and these are the lyrics he was "supposed" to sing, or maybe he actually sang these lyrics but in some sort of mystical secret code, only discernible to those who have sold their souls for rock-n-roll. Nevertheless, that is more a complaint with whomever called these lyrics "definitive" than with the document itself, which seems to be pretty accurate for the most part. But really, you can tell what most of the lyrics are anyway, it's sort of unnecessary.
The DVD was already available elsewhere (my brother,Matzaballman, had already given me a copy three years ago.) It only contains four songs ("Black Sabbath", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", and "Blue Suede Shoes"). I am glad to have it, it is fun to watch a performance with everyone looking so young and cute, but really, they are not very good renditions of the songs, and I'm sure they could have included some rare concert footage and more than just four songs. Rrrrrrgggh.
Last complaint: The packaging. Every CD is dark black so you can hardly make out the lettering. It would have been cooler to imprint the original record labels on the CDs instead. Also, the Castle remasters, released in 1996, actually have more goodies in the form of original album art, concert photos (in color!), and commentary on the band from a more objective source than Tony Iommi.
So,what it all comes down to is this: Tek Ek and NSD! both pretty much suck, just about every Sabbath fan agrees. So that leaves only 6 albums woth buying from the Ozzy-Sabbath catalogue. At 10 bucks a CD, you would only have to pay sixty dollars instead of eighty if you were to buy each CD individually. And really, don't worry about the DVD, its not that great.
Looking for a description of the music? I've already described it and am sick of doing so! But in a nutshell, you've got your basic ensemble of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, you've got ponderous, monsterous riffs, you've got a lot of pentatonic guitar solos and free jams and wailing bass and drums, Ozzy's banshee wail and stupidly scary lyrics. For more specifics, read the reviews listed below:
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