Label: Epic Records
Release date: 02/21/2020
Production: Andrew Watt
Album length: 46.31 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / Hard Rock
Rating: 8.0 / 10
Ozzy Osbourne. When you talk about rock icons, Ozzy is right up there among the cream of the crop. Sometimes you honestly can’t say who should get the scepter. Lemmy or him. Ten years, or almost ten years, have passed since the album “Scream”, and this year we’ve finally got the new studio effort from the famous Prince of Darkness, who named it “Ordinary Man”.
Ozzy is Ozzy. With him you know the seasoned metal clown, who has no equal, will always serve up a full bowl of true-believer humor and fun, even when the results of his studio outings (especially the post-millennium ones) are mixed. Now, “Ordinary Man” is, plainly put, the first album in a long time that reaches a level of quality where you can put it right next to “Down To Earth” (2002). Another studio effort that’s pretty damn good overall. Not perfect, nowhere near outstanding, but very nicely packaged and worth your attention. For the more demanding music fans who’ve followed Ozzy since forever, the new album might still come off as boring, because it’s fairly “trivially solvable.”
Ozzy has always been able to afford the best musicians in rock and metal, and this time he again came up with an interesting lineup. The rhythm section is none other than Duff McKagan (Guns’N’Roses) and Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers). The bulk of the guitars on the album (the phrasing frameworks, the solos too) came from the producer of Ozzy’s new album himself, Andrew Watt, whom those of you who follow the life and work of Glenn Hughes know from the short-lived project California Breed (from the days when Hughes was mad at Bonamassa – BCC fans will know what I’m talking about). Zakk Wylde is not here this time, and Ozzy didn’t even need him for the new album. Two more prominent, world-famous guitar heavyweights add their spices to a few tracks. The first is Slash (Guns ‘N’ Roses), who lent his guitar services to the opener Straight To Hell and the ballad-like title track, and the second is Rage Against the Machine standout Tom Morello, who signed on as a guest guitarist on Scary Little Green Man and It’s A Raid. As has become the custom, Ozzy also pulled the classic trick out of his sleeve of dressing up the arrangements with strings and extra vocal choirs, which is his standard, and invited into the studio none other than the most serene eminence of the world’s singer-songwriters and king of the radio-hit charts, Elton John (for piano and a duet on the title track), and for the last track, rapper Post Malone as well.
In short, an incredibly colorful haul of musicians, or rather of people who worked on the Prince of Darkness’s new effort. The album is vivid and varied enough to keep the listener interested from the first minute to the last. The album can be split into roughly two halves. The first half is more classically flavored. That is, it’s done in the writing style you’d normally expect from Ozzy, while the second half is more inclined to try out different arrangement tricks, which means it’s trying to be more challenging and to sound different, “modern,” but it’s more likely that, especially with older fans, it’ll leave them with mixed feelings and “put them off” rather than challenge them successfully.
Tracks like the opener Straight To Hell, Under the Graveyard and Goodbye borrow some of the phrasing rhetoric of Ozzy’s famous parent band from Birmingham, which is no surprise. Straight To Hell, equipped with ominous salvos of laughter, as if they were coming out of some comic book, is a very good opening catalyst, and it surprises above all because it gives you instant proof of how remarkably well preserved the legendary iconic metal singer’s voice is across the album. Really? Careful here. Counting all the health problems that have been plaguing the legend in recent years and, on top of that, Parkinson’s disease, take the hint about his excellent vocal condition with a grain of salt. In the studio a lot of things can be ironed out, polished, covered up and hidden.
All three of the tracks above are cunningly dosed with musical seasoning, a great link between verse and chorus, and the required buildup of mood. All My Life, too, which leans heavily on atmosphere and whose groove rests on Duff’s bass, is one of the album’s best moments, and perhaps, among all the new tracks (next to the title ballad), the most radio-friendly number. The title track stands out especially for its quality on the album, following the rhetoric of the hit Dreamer, and as a composition it delivers one of the album’s peaks. It’s a kind of autobiographical, retrospective piece full of nostalgia, where Ozzy’s generational peer Elton John joins in on the duet.
I should mention that you notice the guest musicians, you feel them, but none of them leaves a particularly sky-high impression. Watt is a great solution in this respect, because in philosophy he’s a guitarist unlike any Ozzy has worked with in his career, and he often surprises in the instrumental passages, and he also brought the required measure of arranging skill to make the songs work.
This is a typical Ozzy album through and through. The charisma that his voice brings to the composition is still huge and completely unique. The vibe of the songs is a mix of madness, melancholy, villainous psyching-out, and underneath it all there’s a perceptible and always clear dose of humor and a sense of fun. Even when you listen to Ozzy in the saddest mood, he comes across as fun.
Eat Me, where Duff opens by conjuring up some of Butler’s philosophy of forging intros like that in Black Sabbath, delivers the album’s first detour. It’s easily joined by the witty Scary Little Green Man, where the unusual but extremely bold solution of integrating classical piano into an otherwise rowdy track) is fascinating. In this track the sound of a theremin also gets mixed into the whole sonic thicket of the finale. In between sits Today Is The End, where the low tones build an exceptionally penetrating, hefty bass groove volume. All three of these tracks are pulled along by pompous choruses with a noticeably higher dose of musical conciliation, an approach that, soon after he started his solo career, took Ozzy away from what he did with Sabbath, only that in 2020 it comes across as noticeably less interesting than it did in the eighties. A more pronounced detour for the album comes from the closer I’m a Raid, which speaks punk. So, as the name hints, it’s a kind of panic when everything goes wrong, even when you run out of cigarettes. This track wraps up the album in chaotic style with the obligatory Ozzy scream: “Fuck You All!”. Holy For Tonight definitely needs a mention too. It’s a ballad waltz that, in its arrangements, tries to mimic a bit the arranging rhetoric of the hit So Tired (the chorus).
“Ordinary Man” is a thoroughly decent album. Frankly, it’s better than expected, but still more predictable than challengingly fresh, though, since Ozzy is with us of course, perceptibly funny. The production polished up a lot, and that has to be kept in mind. In the second half there are a few tracks that, compared with Straight To Hell, Under the Graveyard, Goodbye, All My Life or the title track, lose their compass in their solutions, but still. You can even listen to the album in one go. Nonstop. From start to finish.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Straight To Hell
2. All My Life
3. Goodbye
4. Under the Graveyard
5. Ordinary Man
6. Eat Me
7. Today Is The End
8. Scary Little Green Man
9. Holy For Tonight
10. I’m a Raid
Musicians:
Ozzy Osbourne – vocals, harmonica on track 6
Additional musicians:
Andrew Watt – backing vocals, guitar, keyboards on all tracks except 1 and 3, piano on track 4, bass guitar on track 7, programming, production, songwriting, choir arrangements
Louis Bell – keyboards on track 10, album co-production
Duff McKagan – bass guitar on all tracks except 7
Chad Smith – drums, percussion
Slash – guitar on tracks 1 and 4
Tom Morello – guitar on tracks 8 and 10
Charlie Puth – keyboards on track 1
Elton John – piano and duet on track 4
Post Malone – duet on track 10
Kelly Osbourne – backing vocals
Michael Dore – bass guitar
Nicholas Garrett – bass guitar
Peter Snipp – bass guitar
Richard Pryce – double bass
Stacey Watton – double bass
Charlie Schein – guitar
Happy Perez – keyboards on tracks 5 and 8
Ali Tamposi – backing vocals
Holly Laessig – backing vocals
Jess Wolfe – backing vocals
John Bowen – tenor vocals
Christopher Hann – tenor vocals
Gareth Treseder – tenor vocals
Hannah Cooke – alto vocals
Jo Marshall – alto vocals
Amy Lyddon – alto vocals
Clara Sanabras – alto vocals
Sara Davey – soprano vocals
Grace Davidson – soprano vocals
Joanna Forbes L’Estrange – soprano vocals
Lizzie Ball – violin
Perry Montague-Mason – violin, string arrangements
Mark Berrow – violin
John Bradbury – violin
Jackie Hartley – violin
Patrick Kiernan – violin
Boguslav Kostecki – violin
Gaby Lester – violin
Dorina Markoff – violin
Steve Morris – violin
Everton Nelson – violin
Tom Pigott-Smith – violin
Christopher Tombling – violin
Deborah Widdup – violin
Susan Dench – viola, backing vocals
Julia Knight – viola, backing vocals
Peter Lale – viola, backing vocals
Andy Parker – viola, backing vocals
Ian Burdge – viola, cello
Nick Cooper – viola, cello
Vicky Matthews – viola, cello
Chris Worsey – viola, cello
