Black Sabbath - Dehumanizer

Black Sabbath’s 1992 album Dehumanizer is the third studio album to feature Ronnie James Dio on Vocals. It will also be the last until the band reformed as Heaven and Hell in the mid 2000’s. Dio first joined Sabbath in 1980 (after the Departure of Ozzy Osborne due to being a drug addicted child who can’t write music for shit) and with them Recorded two studio albums and a live album before leaving around 1983 and forming his solo band, Dio. During the rest of the 80s Sabbath became a revolving door of musicians and master guitarist Tony Iomi. They had a bit of success, though most people are still very much ignorant that there was even a Black Sabbath besides the Ozzy and Dio eras. Hell most people tend to think that there’s no Sabbath other then the Ozzy era! Those are the people I like to call idiots... Anyway Dehumanizer is a VERY underrated album that doesn’t get enough praise in my opinion. It’s a great album all the way through and it has top class musicians on it. It has the4 Mob Rules line up of Dio, Iomi, Butler and Appice

Band - Black Sabbath

Album - Dehumanizer

Year - 1992

Genre - Heavy/Doom Metal

Country - (technically) UK

The first thing that jumps out as you is that awesome fucking album cover! Seriously, how can you dislike an album that has a cover like that? Any way…

The record kicks off with Computer God. A good example of where this record is going. It’s a very doomy song with great bass, guitar and of course great vocals from one Mr. Ronnie James Dio. After All (The Dead) is another Slow and doomy song with more emotional singing from Dio. TV Crimes is a fast, somewhat silly tune with simply orgasmic bass work! Geezer shows off like a mad man! If there’s any reason to listen to this song is the amazing bass work. Letters from earth is another dark, gloomy slow tune. More heavy riffs for our pleasure! It picks up speed half way through and we get to hear some more solos from master Iomi. Master of Insanity is one of the best here; it starts off with a great bass line and goes into a great, heavy tune. Great riffs all around this song as well as more great singing from the master himself and once again, great soloing from Iomi, not that its any surprise. Time Machine is an upbeat heavy tune with some sweet riffing and soloing. Sins of the Father starts off with some very Ozzyesque singing from Dio which is quite interesting in itself. The first part of this song wouldn’t sound very out of place on one off the early Sabbath albums. The song is another slow doomy one after about a minute or so in. But then it changes again! The song gets a bit faster and a bit more technical with lots of cools riffs. Very heavy tune that one! Too Late starts off with a very cool balled intro and, as usual very emotional singing from Dio. The song proper kicks in around 3 minutes, its still basically a balled tune. But you won’t care one the soloing starts. After the soloing it goes back to being all balledy. It's an alright song. I is another super heavy ass kicker, with some truly angry vocals from Dio. The riffs and drumming are immense, very epic tune. Finally, we get too buried alive, a song far too heavy for words! Very evil sounding vocals from Dio and an even more evil sounding main riff along with lots of little guitar fills from Iomi. The pre-chorus riff is pretty sweet as well, sort of sounding like a much slowed down thrash or speed metal riff. Nice bridge part with some top notch soloing!

Overall, this album kicks ass! If you love Dio era Sabbath, Doom Metal or even Dios solo band this is highly recommended! Iomi’s guitar work is masterful with plenty of shredding along with some very bluesy melodic parts he’s best known for. The riffs are heavy as hell most of the time and very well composed. Butlers Bass work is orgasmic at times. Bass really stands out on this record, it rarely simply follows the guitar and Geezer is almost always all over the place filling out the already heavy as all hell sound. Drums are good, nothing special though. Ronnie James Dio (RIP) is of course, top notch here. His vocals are very emotional and at times, very evil. Dio is simply the greatest vocalist in Metal. Bow down to the master! Great, great album, if you haven’t heard it, seek it out, along with the rest of the Dio era Sabbath albums. Any Sabbath era other then Ozzy’s is criminally underrated as far as most mainstream Metal interests go. Yes even the amazing Dio era is somewhat obscure to most non Metal heads.

Here are four stand outs from this album