not the Antichrist or the iron man," he sings, punning on an old Black Sabbath song title in the first verse before going all tender in the second: "But I still love the feeling I get from you/I hope you never stop, because it gets me through." Co-written with Foreigner's Mick Jones, "Dreamer" is Osbourne imagining himself as John Lennon: pleading for calm and sense over piano, strings and, at the end, an ELO-style choir. It's the kind of peace-Beatle ballad Noel Gallagher would kill to write. Guitarist Zakk Wylde punches in with the obligatory frets-afire solo in the middle - this is, after all, the Church of the Marshall Amp. But when Osbourne asks, "When will all this anger, hate and bigotry end?" you don't hear ham - you hear humanity. Except for a dash of acoustic dread ("You Know") and another twist of heavy Lennon ("Running Out of Time"), the rest of
Down to Earth - Osbourne's first solo album in six years - is solid rock. The clean, heated production is light years away from the dirty throb of vintage Sabbath. But the black-chrome edge in Osbourne's voice adds a layer of thrill to the chunky surge of "That I Never Had" and underscores the candor in the steroid march "Facing Hell": "I pray that you never know/That I'm facing hell." In the Sabs and on his own, Osbourne has never done the devil's work. He writes and sings about looking into the abyss - so you know which way to run. He's never done it better.
DAVID FRICKE
(RS 881 - November 8, 2001)
