Black Sabbath – Dehumanizer (1992)

It's quite stupid I have this album at all. As a teenager, I was into 70's heavy metal, but I didn't really know that much about it. Also, I didn't really use internet yet, so the knowledge behind my purchases was often not that great. So, when I bought the album Dehumanizer by Black Sabbath, I was expecting Ozzy Osbourne and similar sounds to Paranoid. Turns out, this album was something completely different. It features Ronnie James Dio as the lead vocalist and the sounds are closer to late 80's and early 90's metal music. To be fair, I had also been quite into those genres around the time, but anyway, this album really wasn't what I expected. At least it features Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler from the original band. This must be one of my least listened to albums that I've bought myself.



The album cover picture is quite something. There's some kind of computer god connected to a cyborg skeleton that electrocutes a guy who also seems to be a robot. Apparently that is a reference to the name of the album. The robot is drawing humanity out of the human being turning him into a robot. This kind of imagery was really cool as a pre-teen boy and that probably explains quite a lot as to why I have this album.

The album starts with a song Computer God that has very 80's style guitar riffs and Dio's trademark high-pitched yelling. Geezer Butler's bass lines are one of the most positive things about this song. They sound more authentic than bass lines usually in this line of music. Next up is After All (The Dead) which starts very ominously. There are some similarities in intensity to early Black Sabbath songs, but the sounds are much more modern. TV Crimes is a faster track that reminds me of power metal of the early 90's. Letters From Earth slows things down again into very heavy slowly waving hypnosis. There are some brilliant guitar solos in the song. Master of Insanity has some very cheesy DIO-like moments. I've never really liked that kind of hero-metal. Time Machine is actually the only song I've heard before I bought this album. It was featured in one of the Wayne's World movies when a terminator-lookalike police stops Wayne on the highway. This is probably the best song of the album. The steady rhythm guitar is quite good. Sins of the Father's beginning actually sounds a bit like Ozzy Osbourne. Just makes me think how much better this would sound with him. Too Late starts out as a ballad with some nice-sounding clean guitars. Too bad Dio's vocals sound so cheesy. I has some excellent metal riffs, which makes it one of the greatest songs on this album. The album ends with probably the heaviest song, Buried Alive. If the album would be more like this, I probably wouldn't have even listened to it as much as I have now.

We are talking about an early 90's album, so of course there's a music video. The video for TV Crimes features a man who steals an old-school TV and tries to sell it on the streets. Black Sabbath is playing on that TV all the time. The style on the video is very much early 90's grunge style, which is interesting, because you never associate music like this to that style.

Apparently Black Sabbath lost a lot of money with this album, because they spent lots of money flying across the Atlantic and lots of time in the studio. I don't think it was a commercial success either, so they must've actually lost quite a bit of money.

I really like the early albums of Black Sabbath and even now that Ozzy is back in the band, the new stuff is surprisingly good, but I can't even really call the band without Ozzy Black Sabbath, because the sound is so different. I've never been much of a fan of these albums.

Listen to the album on Spotify.