Freeman Press

On Chris de Burgh's debut album, his gentle, beguiling vocal style is introduced, which instantly trademarks him as a genuine master of the soft ballad. de Burgh's engaging dominance of words and lyrics carries both his love songs and his simple light rock tunes to a higher level, thanks to the attention and care given to each of his pieces. As an inaugural album, the songs hold well as they are delicately cushioned by his voice, but are substantially thin where melody or appealing choruses are concerned. Both "Windy Night" and "Watching the World" draw the most attention, bringing de Burgh's silkiness to the focal point.

It's almost a blessing that, for legal reasons, this four-piece can't call itself Black Sabbath. It only serves to hammer home the point that with Ronnie James Dio up front and Vinny Appice in back, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler express a very different side of their musical personalities than they ever did with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals and Bill Ward on drums. Where the original lineup was an ultra-heavy blues band, with a rhythm section that never failed to swing (OK, they failed a little bit on "Sweet Leaf"), when Dio came on board in 1980 the group was reinvented as a heavy metal juggernaut.

When Lonnie Mack sang the blues, country strains were sure to infiltrate. Conversely, if he dug into a humping rockabilly groove, strong signs of a deep-down blues influence were bound to invade, par for the course for any musician who cited both Bobby Bland and George Jones as pervasive influences. Fact is, Mack's lightning-fast, vibrato-enriched, whammy bar-hammered guitar style influenced many a picker, too, including Stevie Ray Vaughan, who idolized Mack's early singles for Fraternity and later co-produced and played on Mack's 1985 comeback LP for Alligator, Strike Like Lightning.