Heaven & Hell

There's something to be said about Heaven and Hell. It's 2009 and (most of) the band that actually started the heavy metal genre is still around. Not only are they around, but they're also still releasing quality material. For the uneducated, Heaven and Hell is made up of Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler on guitar and bass respectively. Iommi and Butler of course were original members of the legendary Black Sabbath who, after frontman Ozzy Osbourne left, recruited Ronnie James Dio to take up the vocal reigns and fill some pretty large shoes. That was back in 1980. 29 years later Heaven and Hell return with The Devil You Know and not a single member misses a beat.

The overall sound of The Devil You Know is much heavier than previous Dio-fronted Sabbath/Heaven and Hell efforts. The songs are slower this time around, hitting much harder in their delivery. Sometimes, the slow and methodical delivery of most of them also creates the album's weak points, where some songs stretch past the six-minute mark and could have used some trimming. On the other hand, songs like "Eating the Cannibals" explode right out of the gate and don't let up, pummeling the listener with driving riffs, shredding solos and unrelenting drums and bass.

Tony Iommi is truly a living legend. The entirety of The Devil You Know is full of memorable riffs. His playing is crisp, clean and spot on. It's reassuring to know the man who fathered an entirely new style of guitar play so long ago can still pick up his instrument and show everyone how it's done. Even on songs like, "Rock and Roll Angel" which isn't exactly the most captivating track on the album, Iommi delivers a truly awesome solo, which adds a whole new dynamic to an otherwise stale song.

Frontman Ronnie James Dio also deserves a fair amount of praise. After all these years his voice has not degraded in the least. Dio sounds just as good on The Devil You Know as he did when he sang on Holy Diver in 1983. His operatic voice soars over the doom guitars and drums and adds an apocalyptic feel to the overall sound.

The Devil You Know is yet another solid effort by a group of musicians who have fathered an entire genre. Each member showcases their talents and the album thrives off of their musicianship. With three of four members pushing sixty, they're still able to sound natural and fluid with their instruments, playing better than most of the modern day bands they’ve influenced.

—Tony Caso
05.11.09

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, Rovi