Heaven and Hell keeps holy the Sabbath
Black Sabbath, the world's first heavy metal band, has as elaborate a history as any rock act approaching the forty-year mark. While Sabbath's recent tours give the impression they only made eight albums, Heaven and Hell's show Saturday at Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates sent a reminder that their perpetual veneration comes due to several voices.
Fans will recognize Heaven and Hell as the Black Sabbath lineup that recorded the albums "Mob Rules" in 1981 and "Dehumanizer" in 1992. Along with guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, it features singer Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice. (H&H is confusingly named after Dio's first studio album with Sabbath, which was released before Appice replaced original drummer Bill Ward.)
The band members maintain that this is a separate entity from Black Sabbath in deference to erstwhile vocalist and reality TV star Ozzy Osbourne, with whom Iommi and Butler intend to keep working. As the original voice of the band, Osbourne maintains fans' goodwill thanks to nostalgia and his party-hearty image.
Dio, never a drinker or a druggie himself, often gets credit for introducing the "devil horns" hand signal flashed by metalheads across the planet, but he doesn't get enough credit for saving Sabbath from commercial and artistic irrelevance. While Ozzy's endearing bleat was adequate for their early material, Dio's superior range allowed for more melodic and dynamic songwriting. His brief stint with the band won back straying fans and set the standard for much of the 1980s' heavy metal boom.
Heaven and Hell opened and closed their ten-song set on Saturday with "The Mob Rules" and "Neon Knights," two popular singles that underscored the fresh focus Dio brought to the once-bloated Black Sabbath. The ever-stoic Iommi's uncharacteristically upbeat riffs crackled with contained combustion while Dio prowled about like a spooky old wizard possessed by a panther.
This wasn't just a predictable run-through of hits. The set included album cuts such as "Falling Off the Edge of the World," built on an infectiously repetitive Iommi riff, and "Voodoo," which featured one of the guitarist's most passionate blues-soaked solos of the evening. "Dehumanizer," perhaps the most underrated album in the Sabbath catalog, got a nod with the powerful stomp of "I" and Butler and Appice commanding a typically crushing Black Sabbath boogie during "Computer God."
When Heaven and Hell played the song from which they took their name, they proved it can do a trance-inducing jam as well as any young doom metal act. Yet, it was the singer's emotive howl that took it into the stratosphere, just as he countered the doomy weight of "Children of the Sea" with celestial aspiration.
The notoriously flamboyant Dio often elicits a strange mix of derision and guilt-tinged reverence (see mock-rockers Tenacious D). However, at age 65, the intensity of the little man's big voice -- smooth and raw in all the right spots -- shames most of his peers, Thankfully, Heaven and Hell gave his much-loved work in Sabbath the respect it deserves.