Rigor Sardonicous is a two-man funeral doom project from my neck of the woods of Long Island, New York, featuring members of Teloch Vovin and Abhorrence. Despite their lurking in the scene since 1999, I didn’t hear of them until Thus Spoke reviewed their seventh album, 2023s Praeparet Bellum. How could a band like this exist right under my nose for so long without me catching a whiff? Well, as Thus summed up in her review, they aren’t exactly tearing a hole in the metalverse with their lo-fi, quasi-industrial style of funerary music. The material on Praeparet Bellum was one-dimensional, plodding, and devoid of the necessary tricks and treats to keep such slogging doom interesting and, well, listenable. I hoped Diatriba Deorum would see the duo elevate their game, and in some ways, I suppose they have. But will it be enough to take them from deep, dark obscurity into the sunlight?
In a word, no. While Diatriba Deorum is a step up from last time and shows some improvement in pacing, atmosphere, and overall execution, this is still an inky grey slab of slow-motion doom without much in the way of engagement. Things do open quite strongly on “With God’s Love,” which is a slightly more aggressive creature for Rigor, rocking a pseudo-industrial, lo-fi hum that feels ominous and eerie. Subteranean vocals belch and burp over simple, plodding riffs and a programmed drum clicks and thumps in the background (I’ll refer to the drummer as “Clanger” henceforth). What helps is that the song is only 2 minutes, and if it was pushed much past that, things would go off the rails. “Death Cult” is a classic funeral-death-doom track with an unmistakably Sabbathian lead riff winding endlessly through a colorless glade of dead spruce as Clanger thumbs along lifelessly and Joseph J. Fogarazzo roars quietly in the mulch of the lo-fi mix. It’s got a certain dark, hypnotic mood that works well enough to let the 6-plus minutes slip by without testing your resolve too aggressively.
There are more tracks here, however, that are all too happy to test your resolve and attention. “I Am” is 8-plus minutes of ugly plodery with very little in the way of change-ups or tempo shifts. It’s an aural experience akin to being slowly chased down a long yellow corridor by Pirate Clark from Backrooms. It starts to feel overlong before the halfway point, and that’s a problem. By the end, even Clanger sounds tired and uninterested. “Commandment” is the album’s bright spot, with riffs evoking a strong Warning flavor as things stagger and shamble around the corpse yard unhurried. Closer “Actus Tragicus” also manages to rise slightly above the standard drudgery heard across Diatriba Deorum, offering enough melody to keep things mildly interesting over 9-plus minutes. The weird thing with Rigor’s music is that any song taken in isolation works as a standard funeral doom piece. It’s when the whole album bum-rushes you that you realize how one-note and monotonous their style and approach can be. At 44:36, Diatriba Deorum feels about a week longer, and it’s nearly impossible to focus intently throughout. That said, I’ve had it on in the background as I worked, and it was almost meditative and somewhat soothing. Go figure. The production is super raw, unprofessional, and soupy, but it does help convey a cold, soullessly industrialized aura. The guitars lack enough raw force to deliver meaningful impact, and the vocals feel like they were recorded under several layers of wet concrete. Other than that, good job!
Joseph J. Fogarazzo handles vocals and guitar. His death groans and grunts are appropriately wet, sticky, and hideous, booming away in the hidden caverns below like some eldritch abomination. His guitar work can best be described as minimalist and simplistic. He’s definitely an adherent to the less is MOAR school, offering rudimentary leads that barely change or morph over long run times. If he offered more (or some) decorative, forlorn harmonies over the leads, we would be getting somewhere, but he’s largely content to slowly riff away as time crawls and fingernails grow. Glenn Hampton’s bass work is there but does nothing to stand out. It’s like he doesn’t want to draw attention away from the threadbare riffs or inelegant drumbeats. Basically, there’s not a lot going on here, even for just two people and a machine.
Though better than Praeparet Bellum, Diatriba Deorum plays out like one long repetitive death march into nothingness. Aside from a few vague bright spots, this is a never-ending morass of bargain-basement funeral doom. I want to love it, but it refused to let me. Instead, I’ll use it as a relaxation tool when the need arises. Rigor Sardonicous are obscure as fook even in their own neighborhood, and now I know why.
While not nearly as progressive and experimental as the 70s Yes albums, the 4 albums that Trevor Rabin was part of, 90125, Big Generator, Union, and Talk, brought a much needed rock edge to the group and produced their biggest hit ever with “Owner of Lonely Heart.” There are some amazing songs in the collection outside of their mega-hit and we decided to look at those here.
10. I Am Waiting (From Talk) – An underrated track from the greatly undervalued Talk album. The album was not promoted enough when it came out due to the label going bankrupt, but it remains one a fan favorite. This track features some outstanding guitar work from Trevor, epic singing from Jon, and somehow sounds better today then when it first came out.
9. Rhythm of Love (From Big Generator) – The second single from Big Generator is a solid rock track that was one of the few from the modern Yes era that was always performed live, even after Rabin had left the band.
8. The Calling (From Talk) – The opening track from Talk is a monster, a powerful track that encompasses everything about that era of Yes: big drums, loud guitars, abundant harmonies and a few twists and turns musically.
7. Cinema/Leave It (From 90125) – “Leave It” sounded like nothing else when it came out and really broke Yes out of being just a Prog group. The harmonies were prototypical Yes but the music behind it really took the song in an unexpected direction. The video helped push the song as well. We also wanted to give a nod to “Cinema”, since it is a great instrumental number (and this line-up’s first band name), even though it is more of an intro to “Leave It” on the album.
6. Shoot High Aim Low (From Big Generator) – This was the standout track from the commercially disappointing Big Generator which was unfairly panned at the time it came out. The back and forth vocals from Trevor and Jon was a great touch here and the explosive chorus really gives this song a cinematic quality. There was early hope ARW would be playing it on their tour but it apparently got cut from the set.
Brooklyn-based Lora Mouna is among the legion of musicians making dreamy rock music, but her new single is not boilerplate zoomer shoegaze. It is, however, among the many new rock songs to flaunt a Deftones influence, albeit with plenty of personality to put her own stamp on the sound.
Deko Entertainment will release Trapeze, the self-titled debut album from legendary British rock band Trapeze, in October on 180-gram blue vinyl and limited to just 500 copies worldwide.
Originally released in 1970 and produced by John Lodge of The Moody Blues, Trapeze captured the band’s early psychedelic and progressive rock sound before they evolved into the hard-rock powerhouse that would go on to influence generations of musicians.
Formed in 1969, Trapeze originally featured former The Montanas members John Jones (trumpet, vocals) and Terry Rowley (keyboards), alongside former Finders Keepers members Glenn Hughes (bass, vocals, piano), Mel Galley (guitar, vocals) and Dave Holland (drums). Following the release of their debut album, Jones and Rowley departed the group, leaving Hughes, Galley and Holland to continue as a trio.
Fans can listen to the original version of “Send Me No More Letters” below.
The band’s legacy extends far beyond this groundbreaking debut. Glenn Hughes would go on to join Deep Purple and later be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the legendary group. Mel Galley would become a member of Whitesnake, while Dave Holland would achieve international success with Judas Priest.
Making this release even more special, Trapeze has not been available on vinyl since its original 1970 pressing. This newly remastered edition is presented on 180-gram blue vinyl and includes a beautifully designed inner sleeve, with only 500 copies being pressed worldwide.
For more information and to pre-order, visit the Trapezewebstore.
Paul McCartney is an 84-year-old Beatle, and he has won just about every accolade that a musician could possibly win, up to and including knighthood. But up until today, McCartney had never been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, the annual award given to what a jury chooses as the best album released by an artist from the UK or Ireland. The Mercury Prize was introduced in 1992, so it’s not like those folks were snubbing Revolver. Still, McCartney has released 11 solo albums in the time since the Mercury Prize started, so he’s been passed over plenty of times. Some of those records were pretty good, too! Anyway, the drought is over. As of today, McCartney is a first-time Mercury Prize nominee.
In 2011, when Kate Bush released ninth studio album, Director’s Cut, Prog looked back on the maverick creative’s background and motivations that made her both a pop star and a prog star by the age of 21.
The custodians of cultural history will tell you that the summer of 1977 was notable for many reasons: the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations and the subsequent banning of Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen, the undignified death of Elvis Presley, and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love – the first song to be made almost entirely on synthesisers – hitting the top spot. But as the hot summer drew to a close, another new sound was taking shape.
For six months a new outfit had been popping up in pubs around London. The four-piece KT Bush Band were quite at odds with the other groups on a scene that had recently seen a seismic shift away from rudimentary pub rock to the freshly-shorn new wave of louder, more agitated and fashion-conscious punk bands. The KT Bush Band were notable for featuring a relatively delicate looking, dark-haired teenager whose vocals soared and swooped like no other’s.
What curious punters didn’t realise was that the odd songs were entirely penned by the singer, and were just a selection from the 200 she‘d written and demoed – and in fact she’d long since been signed by EMI.
That hot August, Kate Bush entered a studio to work on her debut album. She was backed by some prog heavyweights including David Paton (Pilot, Alan Parsons Project, Camel), Ian Bairnson (Alan Parsons Project), producer/arranger Andrew Powell (Henry Cow, Cockney Rebel) and executive producer David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.
In Bush’s collaborators there was a weight of British musical history, and in her music a beguiling sense of English mythology. The album was entitled The Kick Inside, and when it was released six months later in February 1978 – two weeks after the Sex Pistols’ final show – it would reach No. 3 in the charts, spawn a No. 1 hit, and change the face of modern music.
Her success can at least partly be ascribed to Floyd, who’d opened major labels’ minds to the commercial potential of experimental music. Gilmour had earned EMI millions, so when he enthusiastically passed on a tape given to him by Ricky Hopper, a friend of the Bush family, the boardroom suits paid attention.
The Bush kids were creative. Their mother was a Catholic from Ireland, who won medals for dancing and whose family had strong folk roots. Their father was the son of a Methodist lay minister from Essex who’d narrowly escaped execution as a conscientious objector during World War I. He’d become a songwriter in his teens; but, recognising the instability of such a profession, turned to medicine in order to support his young family.
Born Catherine Bush in Erith, Kent in 1958, Kate had a musical upbringing – there was a lot of classical music in the house and her older brothers John and Paddy were keen folk players (Paddy would become the world’s foremost expert on Madagascan music).
“At six years old Kate was sitting in on our rehearsals, singing along,” says eldest brother John Carder Bush. He managed her business affairs, acted as visual director/photographer and, as a keen martial artist, was also her bodyguard. “At about the age of 10 she learned violin – which she didn’t like – but she also wrote poetry, which became songs.
“The songs were very precocious – the subject matter was pretty obscure and they weren’t miserable love songs, which of course are the spine of popular music. Things really started to happen when she was 15 or 16. She had to think about her A-levels – and though she never actually saw herself as a singer, she considered herself a songwriter. At the same time she saw Lindsay Kemp and became very interested in dance.”
Kemp, who played the shifty landlord MacGregor in The Wicker Man, was an interpretative dancer who had previously schooled David Bowie in mime. Even in her mid-teens Kate’s influences were broad, wide and distinctly non-pop: classical, world music, piano ballads and avant-garde literature and cinema.
Carder Bush’s friend Julie Covington – a star of comedy musical drama Rock Follies who had recently scored a hit with Don’t Cry For Me Argentina – financed Kate’s first demo, the one that found its way to Gilmour.
“Artists are just pleased to be offered a deal, however unfair,” says Carder Bush. “Their egos are appeased. But I had trained as a lawyer and our father was a mathematician, so we were able to really understand Kate’s contracts. As a family we were extremely careful and protective from day one. We never used managers. And it all paid off.”
Those literary and dance influences were soon evident in her 1978 debut single Wuthering Heights, which charted the tumultuous love affair of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw from Emily Brontë’s windswept moorland novel.
It nearly all backfired though, when a handful copies of the single were accidentally mailed to radio stations six months before release. “The song was so unique it didn’t fit into any category – and it was either going to work or it wasn’t,” says Carder Bush. “But then they started playing it.”
At first it does seem absurd – ‘Heathcliff!’ way up there – but it isn’t at all… those shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief
John Lydon
Fortunately Bush’s otherworldly (and occasionally shrill) delivery and the romantic narrative captured imaginations; Wuthering Heights went to No. 1 for a month – and it was the first self-written chart-topper by a female. The progressive had gatecrashed the nation’s living rooms in style.
“I remember when my mum, God rest her soul, first heard Kate Bush, she said ‘Oh, Johnny, it sounds like bag of cats!’” fan John Lydon told the BBC. “And at first it does seem absurd – ‘Heathcliff!’ way up there – but it isn’t at all; it fits. Those shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief to me.”
The whirling, balletic, mime-influenced videos – there were two versions – were as memorable as the song itself, and set a pattern for things to come. Eschewing the tried-and-tested cycle of promotion and touring favoured by rock bands, Bush would increasingly experiment with the emerging form of the music promo. The video for orchestral follow-up single The Man With The Child In His Eyes featured Bush in soft focus in a provocative, flesh-coloured body suit.
Kate Bush with her mother, Hannah, and brothers Paddy (left) and John (right) at their home in 1978 (Image credit: Getty Images)
While the marketing men and mainstream media were far from subtle in their slavering celebration of Bush’s obvious sexual appeal, she was already proving to be more enigmatic and far smarter than the mindless pop star hoped to make her. When The Man With… won her an Ivor Novello Award and she swiftly followed The Kick Inside with second album Lionheart, the critical acclaim grew.
“EMI really had no idea,” says Carder Bush. “It was run by salesmen who saw her as part of an assembly line – they had obviously never studied her lyrics! So once Kate became a success, they barged in with sexy photo shoots, offers of Las Vegas residencies and Bond themes. She said ‘no’ to all of them because it was the brain and not the body that was Kate’s real quality.”
Kate has never dealt with bullshit; and promotion is 99 per cent bullshit. She hated it. So after that it didn’t matter what the record company said
John Carder Bush
Rush-released in November 1978, Lionheart was accompanied by a rigorous six-week tour of heavily-choreographed shows involved multiple set and costume changes, along with an onstage magician. They represented the most ambitious live extravaganzas since Bowie’s earlier in the decade.
“The tour was utterly exhausting and utterly successful,” says Carder Bush. “That success changed all of us – we were wary and we kept everything close. Kate has never dealt with bullshit; and promotion is 99 per cent bullshit. She hated it. So after that it didn’t matter what the record company said – she paid no attention to them.”
Spent, she vowed never to tour again. Instead she and her family took control of all her affairs, and relations with the media were similarly pared back. And so a dichotomy emerged: at the age of 21, she was a bona fide pop star about to embark upon a hugely successful creative run of albums; yet one who would become less publicly visible the more famous she became.
As she retreated to the studio, rumours abounded and she did little to dispel them – like the apocryphal anecdote about EMI executives arriving at her house, demanding to know what she’d been working on, to which she’d produced some cakes from the oven. Ultimately though, her reclusive tendencies would be the making of her. As chart music went through a period dominated by glossy pop that was all veneer and little content, Bush’s outsider status worked to her advantage.
A string of albums throughout the 80s went to Nos. 1, 3 and 1 respectively – Never For Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds Of Love (1985). No one song was easy to pin down as she drew on murder ballads, the childhood wonder of nursery rhymes, her part-Celtic genealogy, the mythology of a lost Albion favoured by some prog and pastoral folk singers, the ethereal end of goth, the organic tones of early music, digital synth pop and emerging sequencing technologies.
Hounds Of Love alone spawned three classic singles – Running Up That Hill, Cloudbusting and the tumultuous, dramatically-heightened title track – and further reiterated her prog tendencies by devoting the entire second side of the album to a an experimental opera, The Ninth Wave, the name taken from a Tennyson poem. She also helped define the 1980s whilst being unlike anything else in that era: her skill was not to experiment in the live arena but by embracing emerging technologies in the studio.
“For three or four years it was a rollercoaster,” says Carder Bush. “She was being sent all over the world, and fortunately she had stockpiled a lot of songs. But when that stockpile ran out she was expected to come up with an album, then promote it, go on TV, all within a year. The type of artist Kate is meant that just couldn’t work. That’s why each album has taken longer and longer to come to maturity.”
It mattered little: many agree that anything she does is always of interest. In an age of over-exposure, her relative seclusion offers a continued sense of intrigue and mystery.
Twelve years of Garbo-like silence fell between between 1993’s The Red Shoes and 2005’s Aerial. Bush has managed to maintain her position for over three decades without ever once being sucked into the creative vacuum of celebrity culture. The less we see of Kate Bush, the more we want to know.
She supplies me with all the clues and it’s up to me to put the answer together – well, that’s like the Quran of music
John Lydon
Writer and academic Deborah M Withers recently published an analysis of Bush entitled Adventures In Kate Bush And Theory that considered “the polymorphously perverse Kate, the witchy Kate, the queer Kate; the Kate who moves beyond the mime” and in essence suggested that Kate Bush is many things to many people.
“She supplies me with all the clues and it’s up to me to put the answer together – well, that’s like the Quran of music,” says John Lydon. “Surely that’s what we’re all looking for? No easy answers to anything. It’s not about rolling in the money, it’s about the joy of knowing that what you’ve done really touches people’s hearts.”
There’s not enough room to list those who Bush has influenced – but she can certainly be heard in prog singers such as The Reasoning’s Rachel Cohen and Mostly Autumn’s sometime triumvirate of Anne-Marie Helder (who says “Kate’s legacy is one of total creative freedom, taking risks and keeping her integrity”), Olivia Sparnenn and Heather Findlay and beyond the genre to Bjork, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Bat For Lashes and thousands of others.
Then there are the bands: Coldplay, Suede and Muse cite her as a key influence; hip-hop artists want to collaborate; while Alan Partridge continues to harbour a long-term obsession and The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding likes to dance like her on the telly.
Bush’s latest album, Director’s Cut, is suitably contrary too, in that it is wholly comprised of reworkings of previously released material (from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes). What’s more, one song utilises text by modernist writer James Joyce while another features computerised vocals by her son Albert.
Today Bush may not be so obviously viewed as a practitioner of prog rock – not at first glance anyway. Yet her career history and collaborations are inextricably tied in with prog and her ever-evolving output has much more common with the genre than the pop world in which she first found herself operating.
In fact she’s prog’s first pop star, and pop’s first prog star, always capable of delivering nothing less than the unexpected.
(written by Islander) Today we assist Serpent Sun Records (UK) in announcing the new album Apocryphon Of The Unborn Light by the French satanic black metal band Novae Militiae. It will be released on September 18th and follows this mysterious band’s second album Topheth (2020) and their debut full-length Gash’khalah (2017). The label provides this […]
Afterlife have revealed the details of their new full-length album, their first in five years, and it’s set to be an emotional one.
Titled ‘The Pain That Shapes Us’, it is set for release on November 06 via Mascot Records. It follows on from 2021’s ‘Part of Me’.
Vocalist Tyler Levenson had this to say about the record:
“The Pain That Shapes Us is the album that the band needed to write. We pulled the curtain back more than ever, revealing the rawest, most honest, and vulnerable sides of who we are as a group and what we’ve been through. It’s a reminder that our struggles, while painful, are also what makes us who we are.”
The artwork looks like this:
Whilst the tracklisting is more like this:
1. A Thousand Warnings 2. Bad Habits 3. Vertigo 4. Bleed You Dry 5. Empty 6. Sick Of It 7. Crash And Burn 8. Playing God 9. Bite 10. More To Life 11. Parasite Of The Mind
It will feature the already released ‘Bad Habits’, ‘Bleed You Dry’, and ‘A Thousand Warnings’, as well as the newly unreleased ‘Empty’, which sees them change the pace in a big way.
An atmospheric, soaring, densely layered piece of emotional modern rock, it allows the weight of its words to linger on you that little bit longer.
Tyler had this to say about it:
“‘Empty’ navigates the reality of a devastating heartbreak, exploring the weight of emotional emptiness and mental exhaustion. For me, it’s one of the most vulnerable songs on the album, born from a collection of unfortunate experiences woven into one tragic outcome. The emotional honesty guided not only the lyrics but also the sound of the track. During this song’s creation, we wanted the atmosphere to match the moodiness of the lyrics, allowing us to create a unique sonic landscape, setting the song apart on the album… When writing this song, I knew that the only way to truly express the song’s emotions was through singing them, making ‘Empty’ the first Afterlife track without screaming or rapping.”
Some records feel assembled; Delusions of Grandeur feels inherited. The Family is Dylan LeBlanc, his father James LeBlanc and James wife and stepson Angela Hacker and Bay Simpson. The album carries the unmistakable weight of shared history, where blood ties matter less than the lived experiences that shape every lyric and harmony. Recorded at Muscle […]
For years, the earliest recordings Tony Iommi ever made with the band that would become Black Sabbath, back when they were still called Earth, sat tangled in a legal dispute that kept them from the public entirely. That dispute has now been resolved, and the four founding members have regained full ownership of the material they recorded at Zella Studios in Birmingham back in 1969, months before Earth changed its name to Black Sabbath.
The band’s first manager, Jim Simpson, had announced plans in June 2025 to release the recordings as The Legendary Lost 1969 Tapes, with a target date of that July. The release never happened. Sharon Osbourne later revealed a behind-the-scenes standoff over ownership, telling Simpson in writing that the band had not even heard the tapes despite his promises to provide copies, and that legal action would follow if he moved ahead without their consent.
The dispute was eventually settled, with Sharon confirming that all four members now jointly own the recordings and that Simpson ultimately did right by the band in how it was resolved. She has since said she’d be open to releasing the material at some point, calling it historically significant for fans of the genre, but only with the full band’s approval on how and when that happens.
That backdrop makes Iommi‘s own comments to Rolling Stone, made while promoting his new solo album, land with extra weight. Asked directly whether the recordings would finally see daylight, he confirmed it plainly: “They will come out at some point,” he said. “It’s weird when you hear stuff from so long ago, and all these things crop up that you forgot about.”
What he heard when he went back and listened surprised even him. “The sound and everything. Bloody hell, we’d done it in a little studio. But it was fun to hear them, actually. I sat listening to them all, and it was good because there’s some jazzy stuff and bluesy stuff we did on them where we just used to jam.” He added that a good deal of that material was pure instrumental improvisation, guitar-only jamming he can no longer play. “On a lot of the jams, it was all guitar, and I forgot about half of that. I can’t play that now.”
It’s a fitting piece of news to land the same month as From the Dark, Iommi‘s first solo album in more than two decades, due Oct. 23. There’s a symmetry to it: a 78-year-old guitarist digging up material from the absolute beginning of his career just as he’s putting out something entirely new, decades after the fact.
Sometimes Iommi needs to remind himself to write songs that sound a little more upbeat. “I tend to always start off with the doomy stuff,” he said, laughing at his own predictability. “It always has been that way. I just get absorbed with doomy riffs. It’s a feeling I get when I play something heavy and powerful. I still like the up-tempo stuff, of course, though.”
That tension between instinct and intention runs straight through the record. The lead single, “World Alone,” is proof he can still deliver on the up-tempo promise without losing an ounce of weight: a walloping riff, a snarling solo, and vocals from Norwegian singer Jørn Lande that push the track somewhere between Black Sabbath‘s Mob Rules era and something distinctly its own.
The album arrives after a year that reshaped everything for Iommi. Since Black Sabbath played their final show at Ozzy Osbourne‘s farewell concert, Back to the Beginning, he has kept a low profile, quietly refining ideas that trace back at least five years, including two instrumental tracks he originally recorded to accompany his own perfume line. As those ideas accumulated, he decided the material deserved a proper, dedicated band rather than another scattered collection of guest vocalists.
That distinction matters to him. His only prior true solo full-length was 2000’s Iommi, an album that rotated in a different singer for nearly every track, including Billy Corgan and Henry Rollins. Two further records, The 1996 DEP Sessions and Fused, both featured former Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes. Seventh Star, from 1986, gets left out of the count entirely, since the label insisted on crediting it to Black Sabbath despite being conceived as a solo work. For From the Dark, co-produced with longtime engineer Mike Exeter, Iommi wanted something closer to an actual band: Lande on vocals, bassist Becky Baldwin of Mercyful Fate and Fury, drummer Karl Brazil, and Exeter on keys. Brian May contributes a guest solo on the standout doom cut “Death Wake.”
The reasoning behind not calling this project Black Sabbath is, in Iommi‘s telling, simple finality. “Black Sabbath’s now finished as far as the band goes, really,” he said. “Obviously, the last stuff was with Ozz. Anything I’d do with Black Sabbath would just be me, and I don’t want to do that again. We’ve been there and done that.” Lande‘s involvement traces back to a Ronnie James Dio tribute performance, where his voice made enough of an impression that Iommi kept him in mind for future work. Lande wrote all his own lyrics for the record, something Iommi insists on with any singer he works with. “It’s good if they can do their own stuff because when they’ve got to sing it, they can put it over better,” he said, drawing a direct line to how Dio used to operate. Much of Lande‘s writing on the album leans into apocalyptic, nuclear-tinged imagery, which Iommi connects to Black Sabbath‘s own history of engaging directly with the world around them. “It’s what’s happening today in the world, really,” he said. “Much like with the old Sabbath stuff, when we did ‘War Pigs,’ that is happening today.”
The album also carries small surprises for longtime fans, including an acoustic solo tucked into the middle of “Legacy,” a format Iommi admits he doesn’t particularly enjoy performing. “I hate playing acoustic,” he said. “I’m not very good at playing acoustic. But on that bit, I just thought it would be nice and different.” His friendship with May, stretching back nearly 60 years to when the two crossed paths in neighboring studios in the early 1970s, made the “Death Wake” cameo an easy ask, though May declined to appear elsewhere on the record, telling Iommi his own solos didn’t need the help.
Much of the conversation inevitably returned to Back to the Beginning and its aftermath. Iommi described the show itself as an emotionally strange experience, made stranger by Osbourne performing seated on a throne rather than moving freely around the stage as he always had. “On this occasion, I couldn’t see him because he’s in that throne at the front,” he said. What neither he nor anyone else in the building knew was how little time remained. Osbourne texted him the night before the show saying he wasn’t feeling well, a message that, in retrospect, reads very differently than it did at the time. “I knew he wasn’t well, but I didn’t expect it to happen that quick,” Iommi said of learning of Osbourne‘s death not long after. A year on, the loss still catches him off guard in ordinary moments. “It’s almost like he’s still here,” he said. “It’s really peculiar.”
Asked whether he considers Black Sabbath‘s story properly finished, Iommi answered without hesitation. “The legacy’s been fantastic, really,” he said. “I think it was a good thing to finish off when we did the Back to the Beginning one, because all the bands who were fans of Sabbath came onto that show, which was just brilliant.”
For now, there are no live plans attached to From the Dark, and Iommi isn’t treating that as a loss. Between regular hospital checkups following his cancer diagnosis and the simple pleasure of having time to actually live with the material rather than race against a deadline, he sounds like a man in no hurry to stop. “I’m not into just retiring and sitting back and doing nothing,” he said. “I have to do something, and music is the only thing I know what to do. I like creating it. I think it’s good for your mind, as well, to be able to make things up and come up with ideas.” Asked what comes after this record, his answer left the door wide open. “I’m not ready to go away yet.”
Rigor Sardonicous is a two-man funeral doom project from my neck of the woods of Long Island, New York, featuring members of Teloch Vovin and Abhorrence. Despite their lurking in the scene since 1999, I didn’t hear of them until Thus Spoke reviewed their seventh album, 2023s Praeparet Bellum. How could a band like this exist right under my nose for so long without me catching a whiff? Well, as Thus summed up in her review, they aren’t exactly tearing a hole in the metalverse with their lo-fi, quasi-industrial style of funerary music. The material on Praeparet Bellum was one-dimensional, plodding, and devoid of the necessary tricks and treats to keep such slogging doom interesting and, well, listenable. I hoped Diatriba Deorum would see the duo elevate their game, and in some ways, I suppose they have. But will it be enough to take them from deep, dark obscurity into the sunlight?
