13

The current Black Sabbath reunion has been star-crossed almost from the start. Original members Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward staged a splashy press conference in November 2011 to announce a tour and a Rick Rubin-produced album, but the mood quickly soured. Subsequent months brought a lymphoma diagnosis for guitarist and sole consistent member Iommi, a contract dispute involving drummer Ward, high-profile gigs with a fill-in behind the kit, and, finally, the eyebrow-raising news that the comeback LP-- the first full studio record to involve more than two members of Sabbath 1.0 since 1983's Ozzy-less Born Again-- would feature Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave drummer Brad Wilk. The peanut gallery snarked; fans despaired.

That 13 isn't an out-of-touch embarrassment is a surprise. That it's cohesive, engaging, and even fun is a near-shock. As with most Rubin ventures, the goal from the outset was to help the band recapture their original mojo, the chemistry that made their initial 1970-78 run so brilliant. Does 13 measure up to classics such as Paranoid and Vol. 4? Of course not. No amount of good intention could recapture the black magic of the band's narcotically enhanced glory days, and while Wilk's performance is sturdy enough, no sub could eclipse Ward, one of the most distinctive rock drummers of the last 40 years and the engine behind Sabbath's signature sludge-blues cadences. But 13 does offer many of the primal joys that helped immortalize Sabbath in the first place, while documenting the spark that still unites Osbourne, Iommi, and Butler, all three of whom sound about as vital here as anyone could've hoped.

The record's greatest strength is how well it captures the apocalyptic trudge that Sabbath nailed from the very first downbeat of their 1970 debut. The doomy passages in the first two tracks, "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", sound stupendously heavy. This isn't just a result of 13's raw production values; it's also that the band is clearly grasping for the same dire emotions (soul-deep malaise, reaper-fearing horror) that fueled their early work, emotions that from the mid-'80s on-- as Iommi carried on under the Sabbath banner with a Wiki-nightmare's worth of collaborators-- have shared album space with less weighty, more pedestrian hard rock. As Iommi, Butler, and Wilk lurch through the titanic riff of "End of the Beginning", with Ozzy sneering, "Reeeeeee-animation of the sequence," it's clear that a legacy is being reclaimed. Osbourne, for one, may have squandered any remaining mystique when he opted for reality-TV stardom, but he proves here that he still wields an eerie power at the mic.

The album doesn't fixate on crawling gloom. Early Sabbath is often portrayed as monolithic, but the band's 1970-78 discography was as eclectic in its way as the canons of the Beatles or Zeppelin. On 13, the band salutes fans with obvious allusions to some of their early outside-the-box classics: sassy midtempo groover "Loner" and the faintly cheesy yet improbably moving ballad "Zeitgeist" recall "N.I.B." and "Planet Caravan", respectively. And the sliding-panel, multi-movement structures of "Age of Reason" and "End of the Beginning" serve as a reminder that the original Sabbath explored their own outlandish brand of progressive rock on later LPs such as 1975's Sabotage. Aside from "God Is Dead?", with its plodding, laborious verses, the album's many long tracks feel brisk and hooky.

As sturdy as 13's songs are, the album's signature feature might be its pervasive jamminess. Sabbath were never much for the drawn-out grandstanding of Zeppelin, but they did begin life as a blues band on the nightly grind. The group flaunts those roots constantly on 13, in the process spotlighting the partnership that's always been Sabbath's heart and soul: the Iommi/Butler tandem. During triumphant instrumental breakdowns in "End of the Beginning" and "God Is Dead?", the guitarist and bassist braid together like a heavy-metal Garcia and Lesh, forming a single mercurial mass. Iommi indulges in his share of well-deserved guitar-heroism throughout the record-- most notably on the exuberantly bluesy "Damaged Soul"-- but with Butler shadowing him, these so-called solos feel more like hive-mind communions. It doesn't hurt that the bass tone on 13 is extraordinary-- one of the fattest and most gut-churning that Butler has achieved on record.

Offsetting that blood-brother harmony is the odd man out behind the kit. The stiff unaccompanied drum intro to "Age of Reason" is just one of many reminders here that Wilk comes from an entirely different school, not to mention generation, than his collaborators. While Rage Against the Machine owed Iommi a significant debt in the riff department, that band's rhythmic orientation had far more to do with crisp funk than blues-based hard rock. (To find a truly sympathetic sub for 13, Rubin and the band might have looked to the contemporary doom-metal demimonde, home of drummers like Eyehategod's Joey LaCaze, who specialize in the grimy ooze that powered early Sabbath.) Often, as on the triplet-feel verse section of "Live Forever", Wilk sounds like he's trying hard not to mess up. And he doesn't, exactly, but something is lost in the effort. Bill Ward's genius was that he never seemed to care about meeting an objective standard of precision. The early Sabbath drum tracks are riddled with what could technically be described as flubs; they also feature some of the most exhilaratingly earthy percussion rock'n'roll has ever seen.

To be fair, Wilk's appearance was always framed as a sideman gig. (The press materials for 13 diplomatically state that the band were "joined at the sessions" by the drummer.) And there are moments, such as on the sinister strut that opens "Dear Father", where Wilk achieves a real chemistry with his elders. Details aside, though, Ward's absence from 13 shouldn't be glossed over. His shaggy, intuitive swing may have been less commanding than the brontosaurus whomp of John Bonham, but it was no less integral to his band's signature sound. Sabbath has at times weathered their countless personnel shifts gracefully; for example, the lineup featuring late vocal great Ronnie James Dio, eventually billed under the name Heaven & Hell, attained its own special brand of dark majesty. Yet the fact that a full-on original-members reunion was promised and then retracted lends 13 a whiff of the consolation prize.

In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead-- not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea. That chilling crawl, that low-slung death-blues groove that seemed to come out of nowhere back in 1970, persists here in all its ominous potency, sounding out like an admonition of a genre that's grown increasingly overcalculated and gridlike during the ensuing 40 years, trading tortured humanity for robotic precision. Though fans may resent Black Sabbath for not resolving their personal differences more gracefully, one can't deny the pull of that existential outcry as channeled into what we now know as heavy metal. Their frames might be rusted, but these iron men still walk.