Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Part personal bio, part band history, part musicology ... and one big mess. Wilkinson's inability to focus his energies in one direction makes this one tedious tome. With his pretentious faux scholarly treatment of Sabbath's musical devices (such as down-tuning and tritone use), readers won't be sure who the author is trying to impress: himself or 12-year-old budding metal guitarists.
The glossary uses confusing, incomplete or even erroneous explanations of musical terminology. "Chromatic" is defined as "the name given to a scale comprising every note within it." Come again? Try using that explanation on a young guitar student and witness the immediate puzzled face. Defining the electronic effect chorus, Wilkinson duly notes the use of delay in creating the effect, but omits the ever-important use of pitch alteration. The author's explanation for modes is completely wrong: Wilkinson's definition would indicate that modes can only exist in the key of C when he states that modes use notes located only on "the white keys on a piano."
Discussing "Planet Caravan," Wilkinson states Ozzy Osboune's vocal is "barely discernible through the panoply of effects." What panoply? The effect is a microphone fed into a Leslie speaker (which creates a warble) and possibly some reverb. Hardly a "panoply."
The band bio portion of the book reveals few new items (even the casual fan must know "Vol. 4" was created in a cocaine haze) and the personal accounts are a waste of space (how does the author recounting feeling up his babysitter help me better understand Sabbath's music?).
The musicological elements offer some worth, but don't merit nearly 250 pages. Instead, this book really could have been distilled to magazine-article length by focusing on the different elements of Black Sabbath's music and offering specific examples. Rather than listing every song in the 1970-1975 catalog and mentioning such elements as the "tonic/subtonic shift" ad nauseam, Wilkinson should have listed the musical device (harmonic distortion, tritone use, Aeolian mode), discussed its central importance to the Black Sabbath "sound" and then explored certain tunes exemplifying those traits. Instead, readers are forced to suffer yawn-inducing repetition of concepts and terms in an eye-tiring and patience-testing tirade. Sorry, but piling on inane literature/history references and distracting footnotes doesn't equal sophisticated scholarship, either.
Black Sabbath's lyrics, most penned by bassist Geezer Butler, are worthy of study as they cleverly mesh the horrors of Vietnam, drug abuse, the A-bomb, oppression and abuse of power with sci-fi concepts and Christian mythology. But you have to understand the wordplay to explore and appreciate it. In a major misstep, Wilkinson says the "lyrical message" of "Into the Void" is "wildly contradictory," stating that when rockets are first mentioned they are the villain, yet by the second verse they offer salvation. Nope, don't think so. Even when I first heard those lyrics as a young teen, I understood the rockets were the means by which humans were to escape the unnamed holocaust impacting the Earth and not the provokers of the plight.
Bottom line: Rock writing should approximate the music's excitement. "Rat Salad" can't even approach a power chord at half-current.
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