A three-album play, with my commentary beneath each album’s song list.
Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
1. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
2. A National Acrobat
3. Fluff
4. Sabbra Cadabra
5. Killing Yourself To Live
6. Who Are You
7. Looking For Today
8. Spiral Architect
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, crazy good album as are all in this album set, in my opinion but of course it’s my set. The Sabs’ record often reminds me of my Grade 10 English class in high school. It was a segment where the teacher asked us to present poetry that had been impactful, perhaps to that point, on our lives. If memory serves, I chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” which, a few years earlier, I had been chosen to deliver to an elementary school assembly.
The outlier in Grade 10 English, though, came from a classmate of mine who brought in Sabbath Bloody Sabbath with the lyrics to every song on Black Sabbath’s 1973 record. There were some raised eyebrows from teacher and class members but I admired his gumption in terms of pushing the envelope and maybe breaking whatever rules may have existed. His presentation was convincing and in the end it turned me on to the album, full of great tracks starting with the killer title track, and I’m a forever fan of the band.
Van Halen – Fair Warning
1. Mean Street
2. Dirty Movies
3. Sinner’s Swing!
4. Hear About It Later
5. Unchained
6. Push Comes To Shove
7. So This Is Love?
8. Sunday Afternoon In The Park
9. One Foot Out The Door
In all respects and reviews, Fair Warning is acknowledged as being Van Halen’s darkest album. And that’s why it’s so good albeit not as commercially successful but just canvas listeners on various online platforms and the consensus as to quality is universally positive.
No hit singles to speak of, really, although Unchained is well known but even it, perhaps surprisingly, barely dented the charts. The key forever to me has been the deep dark opener, Mean Street, one of my alltime favorite VH songs which contains the lyric “fair warning’ from which the album is named. Who knows why they didn’t release it as a single or put it on any compilations. And, amid the heavy rock is the cool bluesy boozy Push Comes To Shove with David Lee Roth’s cooly expressed “anything left in that bottle?’ talk/sing line amid an apparent conversation among friends partying the night away to which I can well relate from my errant youth.
Rainbow – Rising
1. Tarot Woman
2. Run With The Wolf
3. Starstruck
4. Do You Close Your Eyes
5. Stargazer
6. A Light In The Black
Widely acknowledged as one of the best and most influential hard rock albums of all time, Rainbow’s Rising. It was the second release by the former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore’s band formed in 1975 and featuring the one and only vocals of the late great Ronnie James Dio. Dio came to Blackmore’s attention when Dio’s band Elf opened for Deep Purple on early 1970s tours. By 1975, Blackmore had left Deep Purple and formed Rainbow with elements of Dio’s previous band Elf but by the time of Rising, outside of Dio, former Elf members were gone in favour of aces like drummer Cozy Powell.