It IS a noble effort, this comeback album, and Iommi, Osbourne and Butler (crucially, drummer Bill Ward was absent from this recording) can still make a heck of a racket, but 13, perhaps predictably, fails to summon the compulsive gloom, urgency and fury of Sabbath's seminal first five albums.
Iommi, on whose strings Sabbath depend, is in fine form, conjuring some effective serrated riffage on the opening End of the Beginning and Live Forever. But since those classic early 1970s albums, other bands have taken his sinister methods and speeded them up, slowed them down, twisted and chopped them, and so, for much of the album, the music here is just sounds, for all its force, a little staid. It is often the case that cutting-edge pioneers are overtaken by more imaginative adventurers, and that fate fell upon Black Sabbath years ago.
Osbourne's voice varies in strength and sounds a little tinkered with by producer Rick Rubin. Rubin's production is fine, but perhaps because of the sluggish dynamics of the songs, has little of the fizz of his other work with older artists. The quieter track Zeitgeist may remind fans of Solitude or Changes, while Dear Father finishes the album in passionate style. But this remains a pale facsimile of Sabbath's best.
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