Black Sabbath: "13"

Black Sabbath: "13"

It's not that great.

It's certainly not very exciting, and I do not want to give this many listens because I was bored pretty early on and never was able to find anything to get excited about.

On the other hand, no, it's not really bad.

Maybe the premise is flawed. The idea that a bunch of senior citizens can go back and recapture the feeling of when the music was new, in a different era, a lifetime ago, is pretty ridiculous. It's not possible to go back to the past, too many things have changed, too many factors are different.

For example, the youthful energy is predictably gone. Instead of heavy doom that rocks, we get bluesy music that goes slow a lot of the time, without injecting energy into the proceedings. I don't find much to headbang to, for instance.

It sounds like music for old people: the lack of rocking, the overplaying of the slow riffs, the tired voice, and just the lack of excitement, it all makes this not very appealing.

By the way, I was also bored with that album "The Devil You Know" for these reasons. So, in that sense, this album is exactly what you would expect from these senior citizens of metal.

It's difficult to say what people are expecting. Songs like "Paranoid" or "Children of the Grave"? I don't hear that type of energy. Instead, the blues are too prevalent. I guess this is what fans want.

Is it?

Is that what you want?