Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4438 in Digital Music Album
• Published on: 2009-09-21
• Released on: 2009-09-21
• Running time: 2541 seconds

Customer Reviews

Sabbath's Sergeant Pepper sounding better than ever
Overlooked by fans and the band alike, this album, coupled with Sabotage, marks Sabbath's finest hour. As accomplished, coherent, brilliantly produced, orchestrated, sung and played as anything put out that decade, Sabbath skimmed the surface of the prog rock movement without getting bogged down in pretension. Makes previous Sabbath albums seem workmanlike. Sister album Sabotage a bit more hit and miss, but should be played together with this - The Writ, Spiral Architect, A National Acrobat, Looking for Today, Hole in the Sky and Thrill of it All widdle on the likes of Iron Man, Faries Wear Boots and NIB from a very great height. Following up such genius proved impossible, and both Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die wilt by comparison.

The 2009 remasters really are worth shelling out for - even if, like me, it's your third or fourth copy. There is a noticeable improvement to the sound, which is more than my ears could detect on The Beatles or Stones remasters. With a great booklet of pictures, a 2 page lyric sheet, an article putting the album in context (with contributions from Bill Ward) and a nice mid-price, this for me is an essential purchase. And yes, I'll still probably buy the Deluxe Version if they ever get round to releasing one.

Classic album remastered well in 2009.
As no doubt many of you are aware the Black sabbath Ozzy era has been given another fresh wave of remasters lately, and as far as i am aware the Black sabbath album, Paranoid and Master of reality are the only ones at the time of writing available in Deluxe. The rest "Vol4 right up to Never say die" have been released as single digipaks containing just the remastered studio album, still this Black Sabbath's classic is another which was important to get right, and similarly with the great handling job which was applied to the earlier deluxe versions this is the best version available yet on CD.

It is my fair guess that the majority of you who have come here will have already heard this album and in most cases probably own it as well, and with this assumption in mind i am not going to go into the album reviewing territory on this occasion, so given that the sound of this amazing album is restored taking much of that old 70's excess with it, it will undoubtably have the lovers and the more cautious who feel some of the character is being taken away, in any case on par with other artists remasters in general it's very good, all in all this is very pleasing and now i'm going to investigate the others and gradually replace my old 1996 editions which have had more than their fair share of rotations in my CD player over the years.

So would recommend..... and the price isn't bad either!