Review: Ozzy's Scream

Like many artists from the 70’s and 80’s, Ozzy Osbourne’s music has had a tremendous effect on the culture and music of today. The intentionally dark, moody, doom-laden styling of 1970’s Black Sabbath were unlike anything heard in rock music before and the group’s continued success created the blueprint that heavy metal was built upon. But over the last decade or so, the MTV show about his family turned the aging rocker into something of a joke, and the annual Ozzfest tour has turned from a prestigious collection of heavy metal talent into a gathering for the obese, bald, and inebriated to shout horrible fuck words at one another and awkwardly waddle in and out of stadium seating. All this entropy taken into the light, one would expect 2010’s Scream to suck out loud. One could not be more wrong.

Scream is as much a tribute to the styles that Osbourne pioneered forty years ago as it is a well done contemporary radio rock album. It’s moody and dark. Crunchy, sinister and heavy. At times, unrelenting and anthemic. It’s ten songs of pissed off, toothy-grinned evil melody.

Somehow, after forty years and enough drugs to put half of Columbia through college, Ozzy is still the songwriter he always was. The leading tracks, Let it Die and Let Me Hear You Scream are warped and bent marches steeped in drums and bass with simple, but very effective melodies and catchy lyrics throughout. Ozzy’s getting old though, and nearly every vocal track on the album has some form of echo effect, auto-tuning, or robotic distortion to it. These are smartly partnered with some light industrial elements, most notably in the simplistic, groaning riffs that pop up from time to time.

Life Won’t Wait and I Want It More are wonderfully crafted ballads that manage to properly mix the rising, powerful chords and sounds that are expected of the style with the darkness and gloom that fills every corner of the album. The sullen, tightly clustered chords will dissolve in an instant, giving way to a thundering chorus that falls in a powerful cadence all the way back down into the spooky, diminished forest we just came out of.

The lyrics tend to follow a vague theme toward the end, as we encounter a few songs dealing with Chrstianity, religious disdain, and the big JC himself. The usual topics of greed, holy wars, and exploitation of the devout come flying left and right, and I think that it’s good that in an album so full of anger to see some of that anger directed somewhere deserving of it. And in the usual form of songs before them, and War Pigs comes first to mind, the lyrics aren’t nearly as half-baked as they could be. A lot of time and effort went into this.

Scream is very good. Zakk Wylde’s replacement, Gus G is a strong guitarist. He’s not Randy Rhodes, though. And unfortunately, there’s nothing on the album that will top Crazy Train, or Bark at the Moon, for something being released in the fortieth year of a creative, artistic career there is a remarkable amount of originality to be found. So listen to Scream, and be glad that Ozzy hasn’t fully lost it yet.