What the hell is this guy on?!
He wrote this on amazon about Black Sabbath - Master of Reality.
1 Star out of 5 - It's just dire. Sorry!, 29 May 2007
By J. Green "Jim" (Essex, UK) - See all my reviews
I haven't had this album for 25 years, having decided long ago that it was less than worthy, but lately I started wondering if maybe it was time for a reappraisal. So, throwing caution to the wind, I ignored my usually trusty maxim `If you didn't like it then, you probably won't like it now', and purchased a copy. Was my £5.95 well spent? I listened to it last night, whilst reading in the liner notes that Tony Iommi had promised Sabbath fans that this third album would be `the heaviest yet', and also that MoR is reckoned by the Black Sabbath-loving community to be one of the (if not THE) classic Sabbath albums. A quick trawl through Amazon album reviews in general is enough to demonstrate that no matter how suspect an album is, there's always someone who believes it to be the best thing since sliced bread. Since there's no accounting for taste, statements about an album's classic status must be taken with a pinch of salt, although occasionally you may find yourself in agreement. Well, in this instance I most definitely am not. I was right, all those years ago, this album is dire. Strangely, I found myself anticipating almost every note as I listened with growing disbelief at its manifest awfulness - there must have been a time when I listened to it a lot (perhaps around 1980, before becoming more discriminating in my musical tastes, or when my paper round money stretched to worthier LPs). The guitar sound remains unimaginatively unchanged throughout - a woeful and muddily distorted dirge. The lumbering chord-based riffs are corny, even amateur sounding. The guitar solos are of the tuneless and pointless jumble-of-notes sort, sounding in some places exactly like those that appeared on previous album tracks, only worse. The plodacious rhythm section doesn't help, with its pedestrian drumming and bumbling bass. The lyrics are largely rubbish, Ozzy's voice sounds even shriller and weedier than usual, the song-writing is totally without finesse or subtlety, and the recorded sound quality is awful. Overall, the album production is pants in the extreme. By the standards of the time MoR may have been heavy, but today it just sounds feeble. To be fair, there is one half-decent song: `Sweet Leaf', but it must be no coincidence that the compilers of the 16 track double compilation album from the period: `We Sold Our Souls For Rock n Roll' saw fit to include only this and one other song from MoR - the others aren't exactly a showcase for their skills. In my view MoR is the nadir rather than the pinnacle of Ozzy-period Sabbath. It seems the band just didn't make much effort, as also indicated by the short running time of just over 34 minutes. Even that was padded out with two rubbishy, though thankfully quite short, instrumentals. To cap it all, the whole album is suffused with a depressing atmosphere of gloomy lethargy. It's hard to believe that this is the same band that later produced really classic, really heavy, really imaginative rock albums such as Sabotage and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
