Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

I can see it in your eyes. You’re sick of Linkin Park, Nickelback, Limp Bizkit, Cold and other bands that make Gwar sound like Mozart. I can see from the constant air- guitar you make and the imaginary drum sticks you break that you’re eager for a real heavy- metal album. I have exactly what you’re looking for. Ozzy Osbourne, who is, without a doubt, the most crucial heavy metal artist of all time, has released “Down to Earth,” his first album of all-new material in six years. And being released around Halloween, you know there’s something to bark at the moon about here.

I got “Ozzmosis” when it came out in 1995 and I was hardly disappointed. The melodies drug like Jimmy Hoffa’s body along the silt of the East River and Zakk Wylde’s leads made the listener’s teeth grind into smashed calcium supplements. Between now and then, all fans had was “Back on Earth,” the single released on the 1998 best-of set, “The Ozzman Cometh.” This long-awaited album does everything except make you put it back on your CD shelf.

Forget that he can’t play an instrument. Quite a few artists can only sing and they haven’t been around as long, had as many singles, or had as many devoted fans as Ozzy has. This album is almost as perfect as “Blizzard of Ozz,” his 1981 debut as a solo artist that placed him firmly on the heavy metal highway with the Van-Halenesque riffs of Randy Rhoads riding in the front seat, lunging as far forward as the seatbelt would let them. What’s a heavy metal concert without a half-assed cover of “Crazy Train”? Zakk Wylde, now an accomplished solo artist himself (check out 1996’s downright bone- chilling “Book of Shadows”), comes back with familiar, head-crushing chops that will make your hand do the devil symbol in your sleep. Sadly, fire-breathing bassist Geezer Butler doesn’t return on this album, but this isn’t to say Robert Trujillo can’t pluck the fat strings with the best of ‘em.

The album as a whole is pure, stripped down rock and there are three particular songs of great note that will get all the airplay, and in that Joshua-Tree-tradition, they’re the first three songs: “Gets Me Through” slashes the misconceptions Ozzy’s fans may have of him, these being everything from “the antichrist, [to] the Iron Man,” but implores them to keep on listening, because, quite simply, it gets him through. Opening with a soft piano solo, this song knocks the listener in the head the way “I Don’t Know” did 20 years ago. “Facing Hell,” the next track, contains the lyric, “wake up the dead, oh yeah!” No one else can pull off lyrics such as these (let alone sing them in the key Ozzy can still manage at 50 years of age), and no one can pair them so successfully with the headbang fest that would send Kevin Dubrow (Quiet Riot) back to the drawing board. Another song with otherwise cheesy lyrics is the third track, “Dreamer:” “When will all the hate, anger and bigotry be done?” You don’t hear trash, you hear a transcending of the hair-band image, and you hear a song that has become, unintentionally, very timely. This song also echoes another “Blizzard” classic, “Goodbye to Romance.”

On this album, Ozzy acknowledges the past and embraces the present with an album that overcomes all that is seen as bad--and all that seen as is good--about his career. In my humble opinion, it’s the loudest album since NIN’s 1999 effort, “The Fragile.” Perhaps not as literate, but certainly as timely, and with twice the knowledge of how to be a true rock artist.