Born a century too late to thrill the great halls of Europe with debuts of Puccini’s masterworks, Ronnie James Dio’s fate is to rock, like a hurricane, thousands of headbangers with his opera-ready, vibrato-heavy, soaring vocals.
Dio is currently rocking Heaven and Hell (the title of his first album with Black Sabbath), which is, in essence, Black Sabbath minus Ozzy plus Dio. This may sound like total shit, and it is if you never liked Sabbath to begin with, but if you dig metal you’ll dig this elfin-yet-trollish frontman belting out songs about “Children of the Sea” and “Voodoo” and other AD&D shit.
As infantile as anything peers Judas Priest or Iron Maiden ever wrote, Dio’s lyrics border on absurd—“There’s a place just south of Witches’ Valley / Where they say the wind won’t blow / And they only speak in whispers of a name / There’s a lady they say who feeds the darkness” from “Lady Evil” are proof of that. As does his stage presence—in all black he stalks the stage like a cat (or at least like a dancer from “Cats”). But put together with his voice, his lyrics and posing combine to form a mighty metal overlord.
What’s not infantile is Tony Iommi’s guitar (or maybe it’s just infantile in a better way). In the 40 years since Iommi picked up the guitar he’s continued to weather and absorb metal’s evolving style. He’s added the furious flurry of notes from speed metal and the sharp grind of modern metal while retaining his trademark riffage. “Sign of the Southern Cross” was as epic as “Iron Man,” the monster plod of “Shadow of the Wind” somehow made the same riff he’s written a dozen times sound new and the bluesy, echo-heavy effects during the long instrumental break in “Heaven and Hell” sounded downright David Gilmore-esque.
The quintet has a combined age of over 200 but they attacked the extended set like kids on their first tour of Japan in ’74—something Sabbath just can’t do with a space case like Ozzy anymore.
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