BLACK SABBATH Drummer Bill Ward's First Solo Album In 18 Years Reviewed

April 28, 2015, 8 years ago

By Martin Popoff

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BLACK SABBATH Drummer Bill Ward's First Solo Album In 18 Years Reviewed

Yeah, we all love Bill Ward and the impact he’s made on heavy music since the ‘60s with icons Black Sabbath. But when it comes to his solo career, the legendary drummer thought outside of the box, not trying to reinvent heavy metal with the likes of his solo debut, 1990s Ward One: Along The Way (which featured Ozzy Osbourne on two songs) and the more obscure follow-up in 1997, When The Bough Breaks. While his output may rise above some of our heads, renown author and longtime BraveWords scribe Martin Popoff has always been in Ward’s corner, and it continues to this day with his glowing review of Ward’s latest venture, Accountable Beasts, which surprised us all by looming ahead of schedule this past weekend on iTunes. The CD features Ward's drumming on seven of the album's nine tracks, as well as contributions from his longtime collaborators Keith Lynch (guitar, keyboards), Paul Ill (bass) and Ronnie Ciago (drums), along with drummer Walter Earl and an array of session singers, including Ward's daughter Emily.

By Martin Popoff - 10/10 


Was a little worried when I saw the sketchy album cover, and when folks were calling it Bill Ward Band (hate that), but alas, we can all call this Bill Ward, because that’s what the cover says. Once inside the album and the flood of emotional opinion I had when I heard 13 was confirmed—Bill should have been in that band and written the whole thing, and it wouldn’t have turned out to be the safe record for Halloween it was. Now, I’m saying that assuming that all of the courageous, pioneering, harrowing, progressive, future-forward doom metal writing all over this masterpiece is from the pen of Bill. Not knowing for sure, I nonetheless have no reason to doubt it, because Accountable Beasts is fortunately an extension, a bold step forward, from When the Bough Breaks, which, incredibly, represented the same highly intellectual beeline of thought from Ward One: Along the Way.


Words fail me, but I’ll try. Fact is, I’ve never heard music constructed, arranged, played, recorded—nor lyrics like this—anywhere else, other than maybe Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. The most feverishly creative bits of When the Bough Breaks hint at it, as does the masterful Queen-meets-John Cale “Straws” single (mercifully included on the album), but almost all of Accountable Beasts is face against that hot glass. So I necessarily must repeat what I’ve said before: Bill is the Roger Waters of heavy music. But to add to that, his incredible and empathetic voice, with age, he’s now added evocations of Jack Bruce to his few parts Roger Waters and lotsa parts Bill Ward, who surely has got to be heralded as a great vocalist by now. Addressing the doom, it’s creepy and complex of dimension.


It starts with the contours of the finest goth rock, it picks up with the vibes of Animals and The Final Cut, but then Keith Lynch’s guitars... they are used often for colour, not so often in a lead sense, but riffs separated by lots of space. And when he plays, he dents yer head and leaves a toxic impression. It’s as if a little is enough, because large doses might darken your whole life philosophy toward Magazine, who I’ve called the Pink Floyd of post-punk, but yes, very, very dark. I dunno, and I’m pretty sure I said this before too, but Bill as a solo artist is like Pete Townsend at his courageous and lest predictable, namely circa The Endless Wire, which is a fascinating blowing up of The Who.


A point on the production: it’s not as plush as When the Bough Breaks. While retaining a bit of that record’s expertly used overdrive, often, this record sounds simply rawer, which is both good and bad. There’s something about some of the cymbals that sounds cheap, and the feel is of open architecture and separation between instruments, too much at times, because there are a lot of weird sounds on here, and the writing is challenging—see “Leaf Killers” for example. But it’s also almost brilliantly Zep IV-esque at times, as we can hear on the paranoiac assault that is the title track, where cymbals and trashy snare dominate, and yet it’s so odd and so fresh, it sounds like a wily and deliberate move. I said post-punk, didn’t I? And the more I listen to songs like “D.O.T.H.,” I am indeed reminded of those richly depressive acts moved on from punk but just as fatalistic—Chameleons UK, Joy Division and The Cure—but again, with vaulted hard rock and prog ambitions.


You know, me an’ the buds talk a lot lately about Never Say Die, and how that record is getting a re-evaluation. Well, Accountable Beasts is very much in the vein of “Air Dance,” “Breakout” and “Swinging the Chain,” and even “Johnny Blade,” except thinking about Ozzy singing is 100,000 miles away from this record jarringly back into the real world. Bill sounds like an aristocrat in his massive Morgan library, in 1908, with brandy snifter, pondering life at a level too many layers removed from the ordinary. And it never lets up.


Late in the sequence, “Ashes”... I can almost picture Bill bringing a stack of blueprints to the band for each and every track, testing their patience with his mad cackling genius. I kid you not, this one song alone must have ten or a dozen nuanced bits of production genius that would have Steven Wilson or Kevin Moore scratching their heads. And the crazy part, is that somehow all of these near impossible to describe songs, cohere. In other words, all the points an’ pointers of the inarticulate description above, incredibly, they apply to every song on the album, as if The Final Cut could be Hadron collided down to four or five minutes, in nine novel, provocative ways, and then mainlined to yer mind.


(Slider photo above by: Christopher Wagner)

 



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