By Sean Palmerston

With the recent UK deluxe reissues of the mid-eighties Black Sabbath albums Seventh Star and The Eternal Idol creating quite a buzz about those releases once again I thought it might be time to revisit my favourite under-heralded Sabs relic. Born Again, the band’s 1983 release and only one to feature noted vocalist Ian Gillan, is one of the most dividing releases ever to bore the Black Sabbath moniker. it is one of those records that you either love or loathe. There is no middle ground needed, and none provided.

It was nearly 27 years ago when I first had the chance to hear Born Again in its entirety. To tell the truth, it was a Christmas present from a cool aunt that wanted to please her finicky eleven year old nephew. That Christmas in particular, happening just before my twelfth birthday, brought me albums from both Led Zeppelin (IV) and Sabbath. It was exactly what I had asked for, although I don’t think I knew exactly what I was getting, especially with Born Again. I didn’t really know that much about the band at the time, my only other Sabs albums were an 8-track of their self-titled first and a cassette copy of Paranoid – one of the best selling heavy metal albums of all-time and about as far away from where I was about to go when I fully discovered Born Again.

Born Again was – and arguably still is – the heaviest Black Sabbath album ever released. Kicking off in grand fashion with “Trashed” and its pounding rhythms, the song is a great start to the album. Gillan’s scream at the thirteen second mark signals his arrival and his climactic scream just before the first guitar solo clearly marks his territory. As for that first guitar solo, it was about the last thing I expected from a Tony Iommi solo, as it is very in-your-face and raw, quite opposite of the regular riffs of the song. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the band’s disappointment in the final released version of the record, claiming that the mixes they had approved in the studio to have been far superior. (It’s even been said that Gillan was completely horrified from his first listen, not liking both the album’s mix and the wretched cover, which he initially figured must have been a joke.)

After “Trashed”’s torrid pace things slow down into the haunting instrumental “Stonehenge”, a keyboard heavy track that always sounded more to me like something that would be played leading a prisoner off to the gallows. It is a creepy two minutes that then crashes into “Disturbing The Priest”, a transition that can still make the hairs on the back of my next stand on end if played loud enough. “Priest” was a song that freaked the shit out of me as a twelve year old. The throbbing bass line with Gillan screaming ‘don’t forget to say your prayers’ made me think this was one fucking evil song. Of course, I learned later that the lyrics were written by Gillan in response to the vicar that lived next door to Manor Studios, asking the lads if they could turn down for a few hours here and there while they had choir practice! Talk about deflating years of Catholic guilt almost immediately…

After a quick second instrumental track “The Dark” comes the album’s darkest, most sinister moment. “With its lurching, elongated guitar riff, “Zero The Hero” is 1983 Black Sabbath at its doomiest. Of course years later Godflesh would slow it down to a snails pace compared to what is on offer here, but the original still has as absolutely creepy feel to it that is only exaggerated if you have ever seen the official music video they made for it. That is one weird video clip. The song itself, with its depreciating lyrics and slithering pace makes for the perfect ending to the first side of the album. It also features another strange, otherworldly guitar solo by Tony Iommi. I don’t know what he was on during this time period, but paranoia just seems to rip through his leads in a way I have never heard before nor since.

The first side of Born Again is the one that has always made the most impact on me, but there are a few songs on the flip that are also worth mentioning. Side two opens with “Digital Bitch”, a song long rumoured to be written about one Sharon Osbourne. Of course at one time her father managed the Sabs and she was involved with the day-to-day long before she started to manage and then later married Ozzy. The song kicks off with a wicked guitar riff from Iommi and Gillan’s vocals on the song are some of the most punishing on the album. Born Again as a whole is one of my favourite albums sung by Gillan, up there with Deep Purple’s In Rock. He seems to have really unearthed an evil side to his vocals on this album. Just listen to his screams in the last minute of this song to see what I am talking about.

The other song on the album that really stands out is the other fast song on side two, “Hot Line”. Despite having perhaps the most generic lyrics on the album, the bridge and chorus of the track are divine, especially when Gillan yelps ‘Baby throw me on the hot line / the hot line to hell’. Bill Ward’s somewhat buried cowbell work in the choruses is also worth mentioning. His drumming is pretty rudimentary on the album as a whole, there isn’t a lot of fills but he does have the odd spots on this album that stand out.

Born Again turned out to be the last Black Sabbath album to feature Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward together until they did the Reunion live album in 1998 with Ozzy. Ward was somehow talked into coming back to the band – he quit during the Heaven & Hell tour of 1980 and said he wouldn’t play in Sabbath again without Ozzy but he did track this Gillan fronted album. It’s a really strange record for his playing, with loads of snare attacks and, as previously mentioned, very few tom fills at all. It really does feel like this album is the Gillan and Iommi show, as both give the most spirited performances of the quartet.

I don’t know if the album is even being considered, but I’d love to see Born Again reissued in a deluxe, two-disc package as well. There is more than enough material that could be used for the second disc: they could either use the original band sanctioned mixes of the album, which includes an unreleased song called “The Fallen”, or they could use one of the Gillan era performances that were professionally recorded, one in Worcester MA for the King Biscuit Flower Hour and another by the BBC of their Reading Festival performance (the Marillion set that preceded them that day was recently reissued by EMI in a live box set).

Born Again was originally released by Vertigo in Europe and by Warner Brothers in North America. The album has never officially been released on CD in North America, but was reissued in a remastered format by castle Communications in the UK in 1996.

By Gruesome Greg

Sleep’s Holy Mountain – The Holy Grail of Doom!

As the story goes, Tony Iommi once said that Sleep’s Holy Mountain was the album which best encompassed the feel and spirit of Black Sabbath’s Volume 4. When he said this and who he said it to have been forgotten, but it’s become an urban legend in stoner/doom circles.

Alas, while the Sabs were a band with four solid musicians creating a distinct Sabbathian sound, Sleep achieves this effect with just three: the drumming of Chris Hakius, guitar riffing of Matt Pike and bass and vocals both provided by one Al Cisneros. Three-piece bands can be a tricky configuration. When there’s a disagreement, the third party is often left in between two warring one-man factions, which is never a good place to be. (I know this from personal experience, although I wasn’t the man in the middle…) But man, when a good, solid power trio is ON, the chemistry and the vibe is amazing! On their second full-length release, Sleep really had that vibe, and I gotta say, they’re my all-time favourite trio. And yes, that includes Motorhead, Rush and Blue Cheer…

Now, Sleep is perhaps best known for Dopesmoker, the posthumous reissue of their Jerusalem record, with a more stoner-friendly title. Whether you call it Jerusalem or Dopesmoker, the single-track, 52-minute platter is a noteworthy album. But Holy Mountain isn’t just an album, it’s a collection of SONGS, man!

From the get-go, as soon as I hear the noodling that kicks off “Dragonaut,” a big grin crosses my face, as I know what’s to come. The first song has one of the most memorable, hummable riffs in doom, and I’ve spun it so many times that I can’t stop myself from singing along to the silly lyrics about riding dragons into space.

“The Druid” is the closest Sleep ever came to sludge, with Cisneros barking out some angry vocals, while “Evil Gypsy/Solomon’s Theme” is a seven-minute jam that fits in with those slash-filled tunes on the first two Sabbath albums. We get a one-minute (well, 48 seconds to be precise) bluegrass detour in “Some Grass,” before the slow, downtuned heaviness of “Aquarian” gets yer head nodding along. Although this record wasn’t originally released on vinyl (apparently, there’s been a reissue on green wax—but I’ll take my pot-leaf adorned CD any day!), I always picture “Aquarius” as the last song on side one. [Ed's note - the album was actually released by Earache UK on vinyl in March 1993; I used to have one...]

A note here about the production. In 1993, CDs were still being sold side-by-side with cassette tapes, and weren’t made to shatter your stereo with the levels being cranked through the roof. (Used to be that’s what the volume nob was for…) But even back then, Holy Mountain was a bit of a throwback. Its thin, muddy sound was a lot like the original CD pressings of the early Sabbath records, before they were remastered 27 times with a pile of unnecessary bonus tracks. Billy Anderson, who’s now known as the go-to-guy for stoner rock records, twiddled the knobs on this one, and the one-two punch of Holy Mountain and the Melvins’ Houdini, also released in ’93, made him legendary in smoking circles around the globe.

Now, it seems that the title track is “buried” by modern standards, not coming along until Track 6, which is why I like to think of it as the beginning of Side Two. It’s the longest song to this point, covering nearly nine minutes, with the slow, drum/bass interplay around the 4:30 mark foreshadowing the path Cisneros and Hakius would forge post-Sleep in a band called Om. Along with “Dragonaut” and “From Beyond” —which I’ll get to in a sec— “Holy Mountain” (the song, that is) forms the Holy Trinity of Head-Nodding Heaviness. Vocals are used sparingly once the song gets moving, but with riffs like this, who needs ‘em?

Seventh track “Inside the Sun” is sorta the Fairies Wear Boots of this record. (And yes, I know that’s a Paranoid reference, but I’ve always preferred Paranoid to Vol 4, myself…) It’s slightly faster than its contemporaries—at least for the first couple minutes—and is often overlooked amongst all the great tracks on this platter. The middle section is bass-driven, with Matt Pike’s guitar providing feedback in the higher register until the vocals magically reappear. To be perfectly honest, it’s probably the weakest song on here. But it gives you a much-needed six-minute rest until “From Beyond” kicks in.

Essentially the album-closer, From Beyond breaks the 10-minute barrier, and is THE epic soundtrack of the stoner/doom scene. Starting off with that memorable bass intro, you know it’s going nowhere fast—but then again, neither are you after your fourth bowl and your second bag of nachos. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, as things go from soft to heavy and back to spartan minimalism, Cisernos’ bass and his voice providing twin anchors to the tuneage. Lyrically speaking, From Beyond gave us one of the greatest lines in stoner rock history:

“Stoner caravan from deep space arrives / Rides on the suncraft toward the glowing eye”

Who gives a fuck if nobody knows what it means? The song was so incredibly powerful that it inspired a local group to start playing music in homage to it. TO heavy rockers From Beyond were a pretty decent band, too, although I only saw ‘em once before they broke up in ’06. Still got their EP somewhere, too…

After the epic monstrosity of Track 8, Holy Mountain comes to a close with “Nain’s Baptism,” a three-minute instrumental culled with The Druid from their Volume 2 EP. The preceding EP may have taken the artwork from Black Sabbath’s Volume 4 for the album sleeve, but it was Holy Mountain that fully captured its sound. A must have for all fans of classic, traditional, Sabbathian doom. Twas reissued this year, so you’ve got no excuse!

At The Gates: The Red in the Sky is Ours

By Tate Bengston

I vividly remember the day that I first heard The Red in the Sky is Ours. It was 1992. The genre of death metal was exploding in popularity. As somebody with aspirations to become a metal journalist, I found myself swamped in more third-tier death metal than anybody needed to hear. Much to my chagrin, the sheer quantity of mediocre albums to which I had to subject myself was eroding my appreciation for the genre.

And then, I had the good fortune of receiving a promotional cassette of The Red in the Sky is Ours. This album immediately restored my faith that there was much still to be discovered within death metal. The Red in the Sky is Ours did not depart from the core tenets of the genre, but it did offer a vision of death metal that stood apart from its peers. Based on that singular vision, The Red in the Sky is Ours has not seen its power diminish with the passing of time; hence the reason that it deserves to be celebrated as a “classic.” At the same time, the album is rarely regarded as such; hence the reason why I felt that The Red in the Sky is Ours would be a particularly good fit for the Hellbound.ca “Classics” section, which is designed to honour the less-worshipped-but-no-less-deserving deities in the metal pantheon.

The album begins with a few quick hits of the cymbal before bursting forth with a bout of frenzied drumming and an edgy guitar tone which invests the tremelo-picked riffs with a sepulchral edge. Enter the title track. The song itself grows more furious by the moment, before finally collapsing with a gasping scream from Tomas Lindberg. A brief pause permits a respite before, of all things, a violin solo adds an unexpected touch of class and classicism to the proceedings. With this curious juxtaposition, At The Gates conjured an atmosphere that has never again been replicated in death metal.

The highlight of the album is “Kingdom Gone,” a virulent slab of panic-inducing death metal capped off by Lindberg’s tortured howls. Where most death metal vocalists belched out quasi-comical lyrics with an unintelligible and monotonous growl, Lindberg gave a frightening recitation of Baudelaire-inspired poetry laden with desperation. The song itself alternates between tense midtempo and aggressive fast sections, only to break into a haunting build-up just prior to the three-minute mark. Here, an urgent yet eerie guitar line is powered forward by an ominous bassline, the crescendo suddenly breaking into a fragmentary riff and off-kilter drum pattern.

While Lindberg’s dramatic delivery may have been the most obvious point of departure from At The Gates’ peers within the genre, it was but the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the way in which the guitar riffs and drum patterns are arranged is at the heart of this album’s oft-misunderstood brilliance. Ironically, this distinction not only serves as the source of The Red in the Sky is Ours’ uniqueness, but also its frequent neglect. At first blush, a song such as “Claws of Laughter Dead” sounds positively confused, with discombobulating shifts in tempo intersecting with abrupt riff shifts. However, subsequent exposure to this track (and all other songs on the album, fact) reveals an esoteric interior logic by which the song is guided. At The Gates purposely disturbs and distresses the listener by pushing right up to the limit of a given song’s sense of coherence. While this technique would later be revisited by tech-death bands, At The Gates’ approach was so powerful precisely because it knew how to write parts which were memorable and then arrange those parts into an agitated scramble that somehow managed to make sense. This balance between the structural sophistication of the song and the elegance of the individual parts allowed the album to achieve a precious balance between complexity and simplicity.

Meanwhile, “Windows” deserves mention for its harbinger status. As the most conventionally melodic track on the album, it hints at what At The Gates would become. While the track would fit in well on sophomore album With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness, on The Red in the Sky is Ours it stands as an intriguing window (ahem) into the future. Following this with the manic depressive melodicism of “Neverwhere” and the pensive digression “The Scar” further demonstrates At The Gates’ diverse capabilities, although it is album closer “Night Comes, Blood Black” that manages to bring together the many strands of At The Gates into a grand finale. Here, the band alternates between a pleasing-if-innocuous gallop and changes in tempo and riffing which are among the most disconcerting heard on the album.

Concluding with a bonus cut, At The Gates’ remake of its own “City of Screaming Statues” (the original version appeared on the Gardens of Grief EP) serves as a tumultuous climax to the album. Blending the perplexing and the furious in equal measure, the song charms with a mid-song tangent in which the interplay between the guitars of the four and the six string varieties tantalize the mind with a bit of technicality that would not be out-of-place on an Atheist album.

At The Gates was not to continue down its current path. Band members would depart. The songwriting approach became more streamlined. The melodies became increasingly orthodox. Whether that shift was for better or for worse is a matter of debate, but At The Gates’ rapid musical development does hold one important advantage as it relates to The Red in the Sky is Ours: this album stands as an absolutely unique entity not only within At The Gates’ discography but within death metal at large.