Black Sabbath
Past Lives

THE REVIEW

Well yes, this is my first review, but I always gladly accept the advice of you debaseriani, although I noticed that no one has reviewed a great live album for me, even though it's composed of various bootlegs, namely "Past Lives" by Black Sabbath. The album in question is a double disc and contains, on the first disc the entire "Live at Last", while on the second disc, tracks recorded during various sabbathian tours of the early seventies. Let's move on to the analysis of the tracks, which are, in my opinion, the best of the entire Osbourne era; the first CD begins with the brief "Tomorrow's Dream", the opener track throughout the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath World Tour. The track flows quickly and purely, paving the way for "Sweet Leaf", one of my favorite bs tracks, with its deadly and indestructible riff. We then arrive at the dark "Killing Yourself To Live", which I don’t love very much, especially for its macabre lyrics; we move to "Cornucopia", from Vol. 4, where Ozzy's voice undergoes a radical change, so much so that it can be confused with Ian Gillan. The fifth track is "Snowblind", which clears the way for the most beautiful part of the first CD: and here comes "Children Of The Grave", my second favorite song in the Black Sabbath department; live, it’s even more engaging, with that riff that makes your head spin. And ladies and gentlemen, here is the masterful "War Pigs". How can I define it?.........Spectacular from any point of view, and Bill Ward's performance is something unimaginable. The song stops to make way for "Wicked World", one of the band’s most experimental tracks, with its 18-minute length, during which each member of the band showcases their own masterpiece.......and just when the musicians seem exhausted, ready to take a break, the riff of "Paranoid" starts, and the audience explodes in an absurd roar: the song is very fast and lasts just over two minutes, but it's absolutely engaging. Spectacular!

Insert the second CD, the one never released until then, and immediately you return to an atmosphere of panic and terror: "Hand Of Doom", starting with its singing accompanied by a deadly arpeggio and then exploding into a frantic and unstoppable hard rock. After the 8 minutes of the track, Ozzy presents the track from the new album of the era, Sabotage, which is "Hole in the Sky", beautiful and almost identical to the subsequent "Symptom Of the Universe", except the second contains a masterful solo by Tony Iommi. We remember that these tracks are all taken from the Asbury Park concert in 1975, and speaking of the new album, we come to my favorite track on this CD: "Megalomania". This track is indescribable, it begins with that calm initial riff where Ozzy talks about his delusions of grandeur and then bursts into a legendary guitar jam that will last for the next 10 minutes, a thing to make you schizophrenic. Really!. Then we go back five years and are catapulted to the Olympia Theatre in Paris, where the four held a legendary concert, also filmed, in 1970. It starts immediately with the deadly riff of "Iron Man", mixed with the screams of the audience: a masterful execution, although it's too evident that the track comes from a bootleg, like the subsequent "Black Sabbath", from the first album. Here, however, the execution is exceptional, with Ozzy's lacerating screams that pause to start the legendary "N.I.B", also from the debut album. The last two tracks are "Behind The Wall Of Sleep", which I don’t like very much in live renditions, and the wonderful "Faries Wear Boots", a primarily instrumental track as you all know, with Ward’s rolls that speak for themselves.

An excellent live album, apart from the above-mentioned bootleg imperfections. The whole band is nonetheless legendary and will always remain so. Rating 8.