Joe (Fusilier of Future Shock) Fernbacher, Creem, 4/82
Mellowness will creep up on you like a killer with a hard-on. This is its nightmare; this is its dream. Mellowness, in all its yawning glory, has become a new language--understood, accepted, and spoken by far too many people, especially those whose responsibility it is to keep ablaze the beacon fires of rockadelic madness. At its corrupting best, mellowness educates people in the dark ways of the lame and listless: fear of energy, fear of excitement and fear of paying rock’n’roll back for its demon spirit. Mellow is evil; it must be wiped out.
Mellow is capable of invoking grisly images not easily shaken off with the soft light of dawn. It’ll create damning canvasses that’d put Dorian Grey to shame: Stark raving looney toons depicting all of us rockaholics neatly sequestered away in some dimly lit elephantine, limbless noggins wobbling about aimlessly, waxing nostalgic as we nibble on five pound barbiturate cubes tantalizingly suspended from the ceiling by multi-colored tethers of hemp.
We’ll smile idiotically, the insidious muzak of mellow doom quietly careening about inside our hearts and souls, as our teen attendants giggle and snuff lit cigars out on our useless hulks. We’ll dribble buckets of spittle all over ourselves when they force us to watch hideous reruns of Marlin Perkins picking at his scabby condor bites as he’s busily extolling the nervy plight of some horrible mutated beavers as they built intricate underwater condos near the Luv Canal; images of a mummified Don Meredith hoisting a jug of iced tea high into the air as he proudly displays his new transparent stomach; ghastly images of...Arrgghhh, I hate mellow and it ain’t gonna get this here rockaholic...NO WAY!!!
Know why? Heavy metal, that’s why. Now that the process of revitalizing heavy metal has been completed by the likes of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Judas Priest, just to name a few, a new, mighty weapon is poised and ready to strike at the lulled heart of the mellow beast. Not that metal has ever really been gone, it’s just been hovering, like some thousand pound fly, in the radiation belt, mutating and lusting. It’s just been hanging around up there waiting to alight in the bubbling minestrone of pop music.
Couple this with the unalterable fact that punk music has been forever martyrized to the gods of the slimy pinky-ring cabals and almost instantly you’ve got legions of punctuated rock’n’roll animals getting restless and mean, hordes of coliseum gladiators nervously being primed for a swift jacquerie against the creeping incuriosity of new wave. These edgy, excitable pools of pentup rock bedlamites are ready to use (metal)--granted not that same trad-metal of old, metal devoted solely to doom-dealing blues derivative imagery and drugs like downs and cough syrup spilled casually into gentle, shimmering fjords of nod grogg, y’know, metal as simple apocalyptic entertainment, as an inescapable soundtrack for a life gone totally, gigglingly weird. A metal sound able to neatly codify the sentiments seething just below the surface of each and every rockaholic, that’s capable of lurking in the odd-angled corners of the mercurocrhomed-colored dawns of early light of the 80s. Phew!!!
Which is also why this new, tamping, sonic adventure from Black Sabbath is such an unequivocal joy. While certainly not the epic metal vision quest of Sabotage--perhaps the single greatest leap into the soul of metal--Mob Rules is nonetheless a gasping sigh of relief from those of us who thought the release of the yawnette Heaven And Hell, sans the voice of Ozzy Osbourne, signaled the unceremonious dethroning of the Sabs as the princes of noise. With Mob Rules, these nabobs of the nod, these khans of crunch, have once again risen up and sent a searing photon torpedo directly into the quivering, jellied heart of the mellow beast. That it’s a sheer balance wail of unerring, unquenchable sound aka NOISE is inescapable.
From the first narcosonic graffito of “Turn Up The Night,” which neatly, snarlingly, delves into the dulled quicksand soul of the coliseum gladiator as he shakily makes his section by section quest for the ever elusive grail of ultimate rock madness, on through the overly long, though neatly handled; “Sign Of The Southern Cross”; to the almost Penderreckian experiment in pure, rumbling sound, “E5150,” the Sabs display a greasy heart that’s not only comforting, but enjoyable.
Other metaltoons to lounge about with are “Falling Off The Edge Of The World,” “Over And Over” and of course “The Mob Rules,” which it usually does when Black Sabbath straps on the fiery roods of metalmania and reaches out for that Gideon-like moment of feedback that’s so damn loud and earth-moving it’ll bring down, in one numbing genuflection of awe, all the metal gods. I think I like this album--a lot.
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