It's almost a blessing that, for legal reasons, this four-piece can't call itself
Black Sabbath. It only serves to hammer home the point that with
Ronnie James Dio up front and
Vinny Appice in back,
Tony Iommi and
Geezer Butler express a very different side of their musical personalities than they ever did with
Ozzy Osbourne on vocals and
Bill Ward on drums. Where the original lineup was an ultra-heavy blues band, with a rhythm section that never failed to swing (OK, they failed a little bit on
"Sweet Leaf"), when
Dio came on board in 1980 the group was reinvented as a heavy metal juggernaut. While
Iommi's riffs remained crushingly heavy, the rhythms got faster on songs like
"Neon Knights," "Turn Up the Night," and
"Mob Rules," and the lyrics abandoned the earthly concerns of
"Paranoid" and
"Hand of Doom" for
Dio's abstract symbolism and myth-making. These differences became more stark with each album (
Heaven and Hell,
Mob Rules, and 1992's reunion disc
Dehumanizer), and now,
The Devil You Know confirms once and for all this lineup's unique take on the genre it helped invent.
This is a heavier album than any of its three predecessors; whether it's due to the bandmembers' advancing age or the influence of anxieties felt throughout the world outside the studio, it's the closest in spirit to the first two
Black Sabbath albums, themselves forged in the psychic darkness that was the tail end of the 1960s. It's not until
"Eating the Cannibals," track seven of ten, that the band revs into high gear the way it did on
"Neon Knights" and
"Turn Up the Night" 20-plus years ago. The songs that begin the album, and make up the bulk of its running time, are like slow-motion avalanches,
Iommi's riffs and
Appice's drumming punishing the listener like medieval monks scourging unbelievers.
Dio's lyrics, too, seem to embody an almost Old Testament world-view, positing a universe of darkness, fire, and despair. His voice is as powerful as ever, but he's no longer offering self-esteem lessons the way he once did; he seems consumed by fear and doubt. This gives
The Devil You Know a feeling of genuine doom that leaves little opportunity for the catharsis provided by classic heavy metal. While the
Osbourne-fronted and
Dio-fronted versions of
Black Sabbath are, again, very different bands, this is an album that matches its moment every bit as perfectly as
Paranoid did back in 1970. ~ Phil Freeman
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