Label: Dark Star Records
Release date: January 24, 2022
Production: Tony Martin
Album length: 49.11 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Anthony Philip Harford, known to everyone as Tony Martin, needs no special introduction. Well, at least not to Black Sabbath devotees. The guy joined the band right in the middle of its total commercial eclipse. And even though Martin, with that hugely charismatic and distinctive voice of his, cut (at least) four flawless studio albums out of the five he made with Black Sabbath, he couldn’t stop Iommi’s ship from sinking. A vocalist you bow down to, and yet. Tony Martin never got the recognition from the music world that his predecessors Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Osbourne did.
Back in 1992, Martin dropped the brilliant studio debut “Back Where I Belong”, where he showed what he’s made of. Not just as a vocalist, but as a musical visionary too. A solid decade went by before Martin released a new studio album, “Scream” (2005), which kept Tony’s credibility and artistic stance intact, and then? We waited for the next one a ‘little’ longer. Almost another seventeen years. But finally, it’s here. The third one, “Thorns,” is out. The title brings all the martyrdom on an individual level, captured by the famous crown of thorns and the bleeding heart that those thorns keep piercing relentlessly, up and down and through and through. You can’t escape the fatal hand of doom. Over the years its grip gets suffocating, and in the end deadly. Or as Lemmy put it: you live for the win, even if you were born a loser.
No, it’s not quite what you think. It’s not necessarily “Sabbath-style,” but then again, it almost is. Production-wise, “Thorns” is a definite departure from everything Tony has recorded before, whether with Black Sabbath or on his own. Backed by a crew of outstanding musicians and a sonically thoroughly modernized, up-to-date production, the famous singer serves up his new, more-than-excellent solo studio effort.
The 49 minutes the album clocks in at fly by in a blink. Martin screams out his soul and heart and sings his bloody sweat out over poetry full of the occult, doom and dark outlooks. At almost 64, he still sings like an air-raid siren, and fans of the voice, not just Tony’s but Ronnie James Dio’s too, will (once again) have the ultimate orgasm listening to this kind of execution. The man kills it. With a huge swing.
The album takes quite a few varied detours. Like I said. It doesn’t necessarily push the “Sabbath-style” way of writing (from Martin’s era) to the front, which is very, very pleasing and really pays off. But the album definitely stays within that sphere. Overall it’s undeniably metal-incinerating, at times bold enough in some of its artistic adventures, yet it still sounds very much like home. It opens with the wrecking ball As The World Burns, followed by the ‘martyr-like’ and thoroughly doomy Black Widow Angel. What jumps right into your ear is the pouting, voluminous, avalanche-like, wide-eyed production of the low-tuned, thoroughly ‘crunchy’ guitars in the phrasing. Keeping them contrasting company across the album are the incredibly active, dynamic and rocky drums of current Venom drummer Danny Needham, plus a rattling, tearing, caustic and violently detonating bass, courtesy of ex-Hammerfall bassist, the Swede Magnus Rosen (check out his furious ‘slapping’ around the third minute (the mid-eight passage) of Black Widow Angel). Plenty of songs carry ‘half-step solutions’ in their phrasing, but Martin, with his distinctly musical and dominantly explosive singing, actually ‘neutralizes’ that. That’s why “Thorns” comes across as very musical at its core.
Then comes the third track, which brings one of the more interesting departures from the sacred ‘metal code’. Book Of Shadow, with Gregorian chant effects in the background of the arrangement, makes your blood run cold and sends shivers down your spine, and the song even steals a bit of sympathy from the darkest and most occult moments of Bruce Dickinson’s solo career. The album’s title track, the excellent closing Thorns, has a similar atmosphere and mystique, and it’s one of the album’s peaks all by itself. What makes it special is that the mysterious Pamela Moore joins Tony in a duet (you remember the album “Operation Mindcrime” by Queensryche, right?), and the magic and contrast the two voices build at this point is a unique (closing) charm of the album.
Martin pulls off mood swings in the arrangements with feather-light ease. In the verses, the guitar phrases are sometimes even deliberately ‘sneaky’ (e.g. Crying Wolf, Book of Shadow). In those spots Martin’s fascinating voice takes center stage, evoking even more strongly the feelings of doom, the occult, hopelessness and the ultimate surrender to the fate of personal ruin. The songs are full of melancholy, dark outlooks and bitterness. In these moments, which can occasionally speak in an acoustic tone, the vocals get support from coiled, bristling bass lines. At those points the album even picks up some Celtic (folk) charm (the peak of it is in This Is Your Damnation, backed by a ‘polka’ rhythm, with spoken word stepping up front). As for the guitar solos, no need to worry. The outstanding Italian guitar virtuoso Dario Mollo returns the favor to Tony on this album. The two of them put out quite a few albums in the past as Mollo/Martin, and here there’s another guitar master too, Scott McClellan, who besides playing guitar also contributed some co-writing to the album. In Damned By You, which is the most Sabbath-like of the lot, Tony Martin himself adds a violin ornament in the opening part of the song.
Like I said. A still very homey-sounding metal drama theater of ferocious, gloomy outlooks in the typical British tradition, built in the image of the good old, hardened school of metal. Alongside the heavy riff slaps and the brilliant vocal execution, it delivers freshness and inspiration in the arrangements and songwriting, plus a few moves you couldn’t have seen coming. The latter adds even more to the album’s highly dynamic flow of events and the colorful detours in how its moods are strung together. Tony Martin keeps on singing brilliantly, which is of course the most important thing of all. A string of excellent songs, with atmosphere charged with dark voltage, keeps the listener firmly in the ‘shock’ of doomy outlooks, and the album will be impossible to resist first and foremost for fans and worshippers of Black Sabbath in the era with Martin and Ronnie James Dio, and for anyone else who reveres the vocal dossier of this superb and legendary singer.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. As The World Burns
02. Black Widow Angel
03. Book Of Shadows
04. Crying Wolf
05. Damned By You
06. No Shame At All
07. No Where To Fly
08. Passion Killer
09. Run Like The Devil
10. This Is Your Damnation
11. Thorns
Lineup:
Tony Martin – vocals, guitar, bass, violin
Dario Mollo – guitar
Scott McClellan – guitar
Magnus Rosén – bass
Danny Needham – drums
Special guests:
Pamela Moore – vocals on track no. 11
Greg Smith – bass on track no. 6
Laura Harford – narration in the outro of track no. 3
Joe Harford – guitar
Bruno Sa – keyboards
