Leave it to the bad boys from Birmingham, England, to make a liar out of

me.

After having paid an exorbitant amount to witness a shambolic live show

by the re-formed Bauhaus, I told a friend: "No more of these fucking

reunion tours! I'm sick of every band that's ever existed getting back

together for one more kick at the can because the bag and the bank

account's empty! Never again!"

"Yeah, sure," my friend said.

My resolve lasted through a scant three songs on this double-live effort

from metal icons Black Sabbath. And by the time the titanic death-funk

of the fifth song, "Electric Funeral," hit me, I was up playing air

guitar. I mean, really, who is more killer than Black Sabbath? Next to

them, the supposed "outlaw" icons of this decade are pale imitations. I

mean, as much as I like Trent Reznor, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, "He's

no Ozzy Osbourne." And as far as guitar heroes go, forget it: Tony Iommi

is God and Satan rolled into one, and he's never sounded better -- more

downright raunchy and fucking monumental -- than he does

on Reunion. It's hard to believe that during the first go-round

Iommi took abuse because of the economy of his playing, because he

refused to go off on half-hour bursts of wank-off "virtuosity" like

contemporaries Jimmy Page and Alvin Lee. Today, when virtually no one

cares about the whole "blooze-rock" genre, Iommi still sounds modern,

his visceral playing focused into machine-gun bursts of emotion, his

very sound responsible for launching a myriad of musical

subgenres, from goth to death-metal to grunge. And as for the current

crop of Sabbath's supposed metal spawn (name yer subgenre), one listen

to this album exposes their near- total lack of imagination in

comparison.

My love for the Ozzman is well-documented, and make no mistake,

Osbourne's singing is a revelation on Reunion: where

contemporaries like Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey fail due to the

ravages of time and decadence, the Ozzman somehow prevails. Maybe he

negotiated a second mortgage on his soul with ole Lucifer, who knows?

But this review is a tribute to the genius of Tony Iommi, who weathered

the dark, non-Ozzy years.

The biggest thrill of Reunion, then, is how after almost two

decades apart the Sabs are not content to merely reproduce their old

material, but to monster-mash the originals to bits. Listen, for

instance, to Iommi's skagadelic groove on "Electric Funeral," and go

into a spasm of "we're not worthy" prostration. And let's not forget the

surly stomp of rhythm section Geezer Butler (bass) and the

long-suffering Bill Ward (drums), they who provide the plodding

framework for Iommi and Osbourne's evil machinations. Revel in the

speedball blues of "Snowblind," surely the most inspired ode to cocaine

ever written. And realize that the old blues-hippie critics had it all

wrong: rather than ape and/or rip off a previously existing style a la

Clapton, Page and company, Iommi and his working-class brethren created

their own idiosyncratic strain of satanic, nuclear blues -- music culled

from the rotting underside of the psychedelic dream and from the

desolation of those left out of the capitalist gold rush.

Also cool here is the way the boys throw in some obscurities for good

measure alongside tried-and-true faves like "Paranoid" and "War Pigs."

Listening to the cold and forlorn, Gothic guitar intro to "Spiral

Architect" (from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), for instance, one can

travel back in time to witness a new genre being spawned, as somewhere

in England a young Robert Smith also listens and dreams of his own

version of Sabbath for middle-class kids that he will call The Cure.

Another obscurity, "Dirty Women" (from Technical Ecstasy), is

also given new life, with Iommi slinging out some of the blackest,

scuzziest sheets of wah-wah guitar imaginable as Ozzy details the

pursuit of some "take-away women" who "won't fail."

As for the two new studio efforts included here, a little rust is

evident on both "Psycho Man" and "Selling My Soul," the former

progressing through a number of stop-start tempo shifts a la

classic Sabs and the latter a more straightforward, dirty doom-rocker

with Ozzy waxing existential ("I don't read the holy books, 'cause they

take me nowhere") as Iommi pours on the coal. In unfamiliar territory,

the band seems to be feeling its way along here, getting to know each

other again. Still, gimme even tentative Sabs over pretenders

like Metallica any day of the week.

Anyway, who better to get me to break my "No Reunions" vow than the band

who first taught me that all rules are made to be broken? Perhaps the

devil made them do it. Whatever. Bring on the tour!