Tyr - Black Sabbath

Consistency was never Black Sabbath's strong point, and the arrival of the nineties proved even more troublesome than the eighties for Tony Iommi and whatever other musicians he banded together to record radically different albums all credited to Black Sabbath. 'Tyr' is a welcome anomaly in this turbulent discography, for more or less continuing where its illustrious predecessor 'Headless Cross' left off, and marking the third (third!) vocal performance from Tony Martin, a.k.a. the one who wasn't Ronnie James Dio, but sounded a bit like a slightly inferior version of him. Despite coming so far down the line and following a much different sound to the classic ...  Read the complete review

TYR was one of the albums Black Sabbath made during the years where they found it hard to keep a stable line-up and they constanly had musicians joining and leaving the band. As you would expect this had a bad effect on the production of their albums and even though TYR is a great album it isn't as good as many of Sabbath's others. There's still the superb Tony Martin on vocals and the ever present Tony Iommi being the backbone of the band on guitar. On bass there is Neil Murray formerly of Whitesnake and The Gary Moore Band. On drums is the legendary Cozy Powell and Geoff Nicolls is once again on keyboards. TYR is plagued with the same problem that ...  Read the complete review

Well, this is the sort of Sabbath album you would never expect: a concept album. The weird thing about this concept album is that it dwells into Norse mythology. I always thought Tony Martin dealt more with myth and lore in his lyrics much like Ronnie James Dio. It's actually surprisingly good music, but you have to listen to it many times for it to finally sink in. "Anno Mundi" is a good track, as are the three that flow into each other: "The Battle of TYR," "Odin's Court," and "Valhalla." The best track on here has to be the "Sabbath Stones" and I absolutely dug the last minute of this song! ...  Read the complete review