Tony Martin
Scream

"Forbidden" from 1995 represents the swan song for the name "Black Sabbath": an album released too prematurely, just one year after the excellent "Cross Purposes": weak and uninspired, although not lacking in interesting points, it turned out to be a sales and critical flop. From that moment on, Tony Iommi began a long phase of career decline, which is still ongoing, and frontman Tony Martin, after a long series of participations in various musical projects, returned to the scene in 2005 as a full-fledged musician with "Scream": not just a singer but also a bassist, drummer, and producer, with the added value of the trusted Geoff Nicholls, always able to make a difference on keyboards and his son Joe Harford as the main guitarist.

If the first solo album, "Back Where I Belong" from 1992, represented a departure from the Sabs' style, in "Scream" Anthony Philip Harford (the real name of our artist) seems almost eager to proudly reaffirm his noble heritage, settling on a hard rock/metal that is more massive than fast, where he demonstrates having learned the lessons of master Iommi: the brevity of the album ensures its absolute fluidity and longevity of listening, the excellence of the compositions and the clarity of the sounds in the production do the rest: "Scream" is a great album, starting with a song certainly foreign to the context but of great historical as well as musical value, "Raising Hell", recorded in 1998 with Cozy Powell on drums, a few months before his premature death: originally written by Geoff Nicholls for Black Sabbath, it is a track with AOR nuances, easily captivating thanks to the beautiful keyboard riff that outlines the melody and the ironic and carefree touch of Martin's interpretation. Potentially an excellent launching single, but "Raising Hell" does not represent the style of the album, which travels on decidedly more Sabbath-like coordinates: for example, in the refined structure of "Bitter Sweet", imposing and characterized by various tempo changes, a riff clearly inspired by "Symptom Of The Universe" is inserted, leading to a wonderful accelerating finale, while "Faith In Madness", with its "soft" start and markedly Iommi-inspired sound, echoes the style of "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" or "Can't Get Close Enough To You". "I'm Gonna Live Forever" is a textbook hard rock ride, faster and more epic than the previous ones, providing a substantial appetizer to the majestic title track, introduced by the solemn Hammond organ of Geoff Nicholls interspersed with the roar of a motorcycle, which soars into a liberating chorus followed by a perfectly fitting and surprising violin solo, played by Tony Martin himself, crowning the most classy and inventive piece of the album, a whirlwind that perfectly evokes the cover image.

After this substantial four-of-a-kind that forms the backbone of "Scream", the album continues somewhat routinely with the subsequent "Surely Love Is Dead" and "The Kids Of Today (Don't Understand The Blues)", where Geoff Nicholls' organ still stands out, closing with "Wherever You Go", a brief acoustic ballad that unfortunately fails to take off, and "Fields Of Lies", a fairly long and elaborate composition, though essential and aggressive, initially less impactful compared to the rest of the album, but overall a very fitting closure for an album by a musician who, without posturing, without causing a buzz but always with great sincerity, passion, and talent, still proves to be synonymous with great music. Excellent as a singer, all-around songwriter, and even as a drummer, Tony Martin with "Scream" manages to reinterpret the Black Sabbath sound in a modern, heavy, and faster key, following as an initial cue the trajectory of "Cross Purposes" while always managing to add something of his own. An excellent and much-appreciated confirmation in anticipation of the much-anticipated third solo album "The Book Of Shadows", which I hope to tell you about in the future on these pages.