First Play of the Millennium : Ozzy Osbourne - The Ultimate Sin
If anyone hasn't discovered Spotify yet, may I take this opportunity to recommend it most highly. It's basically a streaming music service with a vast catalogue of music you can listen to online legally and with money going to the artists concerned. How do they do this you ask? Well, you either get the odd advert (which are annoying but mainly because they tend to be the same one over and over) every 3-5 songs, or you can pay to be advert free at either 99p for a 24 hour pass or £10 a month. Eminently reasonably I thought. I use it free because I generally use it as a 'try before you buy' system and therefore can stand the odd ad, but I have now come up against wanting to listen to something that's only available to paid users...
Apart from trialing new stuff (the new Muse album for example) I've also been digging out old stuff I haven't heard for years. Last weekend I was listening to a bunch of cheesy rock (Van Halen, Bad English, Ozzy and the like) and I fancied some more of Mr Osbourne, so onto Spotify I went where I see The Ultimate Sin. An album I had on tape back in the eighties, but can scarcely have heard since. I clicked to play it and immediately a big sily grin extended across my face.
Never mind 1999, it must be 1989 at the latest since I heard this and yet I know it all. Most of the words, and certainly the flow of all the songs. In fact, I am shocked to discover that a guitar melody that I've had in my head forever (it occasionally pops to the surface, bugs me for a day, then goes away) is in fact the intro to the epic Killer of Giants.
But it's not just Killer of Giants. Lightnight Strikes, Never and Thank God For The Bomb (which I'm now old enough to understans the lyric for!), and of course the cherry on top of the album that is the classic Shot In The Dark, which is just amazing as ever. This is a practically flawless era rock record, full of massive riffs, solos and Ozzy in an unexpectedly tuneful mode. It's a silly grin of a record; one that you might choose to play when pissed off, but by the time you're done you'll be happy having dismissed whatever or whoever it was that put you in the funk as unimportant and possibly rotting in the pit of hell.
Spotify also gives you a bit of info about the album and I learned that this album has been out of print for a long time due to dispute over the credit and royalties from that last track which might go some way to its falling off my radar so completely. I am therefore pleased to find it in Fopp the following day so that I can have it advert free, on the stereo, the iPod and in the car.
Like Talk, the previous entry in this series, it's difficult to say how dated this is. On one hand it's very cheesy and over the top, but it always was - that was the genre that was effectively being defined at the time and is still very much around today, but there's still a credibility to this that even much of today's albums lack. Sound wise it's amazing, although that might have something to do with the remastering job, which if I may take a moment to mention, is also brilliant and sensitively done. Drums and bass are picked out clearly, but it hasn't lost that 80s sound which some might seek to eradicate, but so defines these albums.
This has gone from being a long lost love to a regular play on the iPod. Funnily enough I've found it suits my walk to work rather well. I don't want to speculate on why that might be....
Apart from trialing new stuff (the new Muse album for example) I've also been digging out old stuff I haven't heard for years. Last weekend I was listening to a bunch of cheesy rock (Van Halen, Bad English, Ozzy and the like) and I fancied some more of Mr Osbourne, so onto Spotify I went where I see The Ultimate Sin. An album I had on tape back in the eighties, but can scarcely have heard since. I clicked to play it and immediately a big sily grin extended across my face.
Never mind 1999, it must be 1989 at the latest since I heard this and yet I know it all. Most of the words, and certainly the flow of all the songs. In fact, I am shocked to discover that a guitar melody that I've had in my head forever (it occasionally pops to the surface, bugs me for a day, then goes away) is in fact the intro to the epic Killer of Giants.
But it's not just Killer of Giants. Lightnight Strikes, Never and Thank God For The Bomb (which I'm now old enough to understans the lyric for!), and of course the cherry on top of the album that is the classic Shot In The Dark, which is just amazing as ever. This is a practically flawless era rock record, full of massive riffs, solos and Ozzy in an unexpectedly tuneful mode. It's a silly grin of a record; one that you might choose to play when pissed off, but by the time you're done you'll be happy having dismissed whatever or whoever it was that put you in the funk as unimportant and possibly rotting in the pit of hell.
Spotify also gives you a bit of info about the album and I learned that this album has been out of print for a long time due to dispute over the credit and royalties from that last track which might go some way to its falling off my radar so completely. I am therefore pleased to find it in Fopp the following day so that I can have it advert free, on the stereo, the iPod and in the car.
Like Talk, the previous entry in this series, it's difficult to say how dated this is. On one hand it's very cheesy and over the top, but it always was - that was the genre that was effectively being defined at the time and is still very much around today, but there's still a credibility to this that even much of today's albums lack. Sound wise it's amazing, although that might have something to do with the remastering job, which if I may take a moment to mention, is also brilliant and sensitively done. Drums and bass are picked out clearly, but it hasn't lost that 80s sound which some might seek to eradicate, but so defines these albums.
This has gone from being a long lost love to a regular play on the iPod. Funnily enough I've found it suits my walk to work rather well. I don't want to speculate on why that might be....