Black Obsidan

Black Sabbath was embroiled in a protracted legal battle with its former manager in 1975 when the band started recording its sixth studio album, SABOTAGE. The group felt sabotaged at every turn – hence the album’s title – but that feeling helped fuel the intensity of the new music they were making. In spite of the distractions, the band created one of the most dynamic – and underappreciated – albums of its legendary career.

U.K. supergroup Crippled Black Phoenix is a progressive post-rock musical collective that has featured nearly 30 members in its rotating roster. A constant driving force is Justin Greaves of Electric Wizard and Iron Monkey, who started the band in 2004 with the help of Mogwai bassist Dominic Aitchison. In 2006, Crippled Black Phoenix released their first album, "A Love of Shared Disasters", and started concentrating on live shows, which often involved more than a dozen members on-stage.
Although originally having an unorthodox start, since all the band members were part of and busy with other projects at the time of the band's founding, Crippled Black Phoenix remained committed to staying together and forged their sound…

Dimensions in Sound is one of Stanley Black's weirdest albums. A product of the mid- to late '60s, it taps into contemporary pop culture with "These Boots Are Made for Walking," "A Taste of Honey," "Michelle" (grossly intoned by the London Festival Chorus) and "Alfie" (played on acoustic guitar with sugary strings and oddly detached voices). Black shows off his keyboard chops with a reasonably dignified rendering of Chopin's "Fantasy Impromptu" and a suitably epic take on the music from Exodus; he also demonstrates a marvelously eccentric and creative sense of humor by basing what amounts to an eight-and-a-half-minute piano concerto on the ancient folk ditty "Three Blind Mice." Black's big-band treatment of Billy Strayhorn's "Take the 'A' Train" begins and ends with the sound of a passing subway…

After three strong-selling albums in a row, Black Oak Arkansas released Ain't Life Grand to a somewhat cool response. The successes of the past seemed to have afforded the group better recording accommodations, as this 1975 offering sounds vastly superior to anything that preceded it. The material isn't improved, but the performances are tighter, and the mixes are punchy and clear. James "Jim Dandy" Mangrum still dominates the proceedings with his snarling vocals; however, the singer's more annoying ticks are softened a little, making this a very listenable record. Highlights include a decent cover of the Beatles' "Taxman," the uplifting closer "Let Life Be Good to You," and "Keep On," with its pronounced Grateful Dead shading. Outside of their two near-classics, Raunch 'N' Roll Live, and High On the Hog, this just might be the best effort from Mangrum and Black Oak Arkansas.

Colin Vearncombe will forever be preserved in pop aspic as the maker of 1987’s melancholy worldwide hit Wonderful Life – No 1 in Austria! – but he hasn’t stopped working, despite his not having breached the top 40 for 27 years. Blind Faith, his seventh album under the Black flag, is a marvellous little thing – a less temperamental, less self-regarding cousin to Scott Walker’s first four solo records. Like them, it’s steeped in European balladry, and filled with delicious arrangements – the swooping strings and jazzy shuffles of Womanly Panther are a delight. Vearncombe’s slightly frayed baritone is a perfect match to the music, steering it clear of pomposity, filling it with humanity, even when the regrets well up – “I am not the man you want me to be,” he sings on Not the Man, “Here comes the talking / Slamming doors you then have to throw open.” Pop stardom is a long way in the past for Vearncombe, but Blind Faith is an album by a man very much in control of his gifts.