Sinners, Say Your Prayers Tonight (The Eternal Idol - Black Sabbath)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	The Eternal Idol - Black Sabbath
Date:	21/02/08 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It has Tony Iommi in it, and he does some nice acoustic stuff.

Disadvantages: Nothing distinctive or particularly enthralling about it.

After the shambles of 'Seventh Star,' a mediocre rock album that Tony Iommi wrote and recorded as a solo album before being pressured into re-branding it as Black Sabbath (ultimately leading to the bizarre billing of 'Black Sabbath feat. Tony Iommi,' despite Iommi being the only band member present who had any type of history with Sabbath at all), 'The Eternal Idol' is a welcome return to form. Unfortunately, that form is pretty much a direct continuation of the last-but-one Sabbath effort 'Born Again,' which ditched their grander heavy metal stylings for more simplistic and generic hard rock.

This is the first album to feature new regular vocalist Tony Martin, drafted in at pretty much the last minute, but sadly his high and epic voice doesn't really suit the more raw and primitive style written for him here, and the album suffers as a result; 'Lost Forever' lacks the required aggression, and Martin's harmonious descriptions of monster in 'Nightmare' lack any sense of Ozzy Osbourne's terrified wailings. Even Tony Iommi continues to work lazily through the recording, throwing out some pretty good riffs in the fast 'Hard Life to Love' and the dingier 'Ancient Warrior' and 'Eternal Idol,' but mostly just going along with it. At roughly five minutes a piece, most of these songs are overlong and too repetitive, and Eric Singer's drums become tiresome in their plodding after the first track.

While there are no real innovations in this disappointing bit of record contract filler, Iommi does experiment quite nicely with acoustic guitar in the opening song and later in the instrumental 'Scarlet Pimpernel,' doubling his melodies up and even adding backing electric guitar, and generally making a nice refrain from the otherwise very standard, unimpressive and ten years out-of-date hard rock of the majority. Only 'Eternal Idol' comes close to matching the Sabbath of old, with Iommi's one truly dark and evil set of riffs here, but Geoff Nichols' keyboards end up killing that atmosphere somewhat by being a little too polished and bad-eighties, rather than the good-eighties performance of the subsequent 'Headless Cross' album, one of my all-time favourites (after the early seventies and Dio stuff, obviously). These mid-eighties Sabbath albums are best avoided by all but the most ardent hard rock fans who desperately crave something exactly the same but slightly inferior to the albums they already own, but this was fortunately the last Sabbath stinker, before their final 1995 lack-of-effort 'Forbidden.'

With the amateur execution extending to the album artwork, it appears that permission to use a photograph of Auguste Rodin's eponymous Eternal Idol sculpture was denied, meaning that, in absence of a master sculptor who could work to a tight deadline, two models were hired, stripped, entwined, painted bronze and photographed.

1. The Shining
2. Ancient Warrior
3. Hard Life to Love
4. Glory Ride
5. Born to Lose
6. Nightmare
7. Scarlet Pimpernel
8. Lost Forever
9. Eternal Idol

Summary: Black Sabbath's thirteenth studio album (1986).