Order of the Black vs. Scream. Who ya got?

Well, I had gotten halfway through both releases on this head to head and for some reason the draft did not save so I could continue with this today. That pretty much fucking sucks because I really don't feel like going back over this thing again. I even verified that the draft was being saved last night too. Oh well, I guess technical difficulties are bound to happen, I just wish it would have hit an article with less work put into it.

Let's just say the record was 5-2-1 in favor of Black Label Society by the time the post crashed. Here are my impressions of each album after the jump.

Order of the Black: It's a Black Label Society cd pure and simple. It's straight forward southern tinged metal and if you liked the previous albums you'll find good stuff on here. Otherwise if you're bored with BLS already this won't fix it. Zakk continues to put about 3 songs too many on his albums as they start sounding familiar. There are some good catchy punishing tunes with one treading on stoner metal territory. I think the sobriety shows though because his playing is cleaner across the board though I could have done without three of the five overly sappy ballads on here. The pinched harmonics are obviously back and in one track more then ever. I honestly think it's a habit he can't break. It's a good solid album with Zakk Wylde's stamp on it and I think he's doing fine without having to worry about Ozzy's camp as well.

Scream: With the exception of two tracks this album is boring. Ozzy is using vocoder effects too much and the messages in the songs are the same tired shit he does every time. We get it...mankind is violent and you're having epiphanies all the time. A couple of the songs were just embarassing in their lyrics like in the opening track "Let it die". Gus G. is a good technical player but there is no feeling. Some of the tracks you could tell it has Zakk's writing all over it because it was the same guitar tone. At this point I don't think it matters who is on guitar because Ozzy honestly should have stayed retired years ago. There is no creative juices anymore.This album is for diehards and fanboys only. Anybody new to Ozzy is not going to like this.

I'll listen to more of these albums and get a more complete idea of them later but at 15 and 13 tracks respectively and I got over halfway with these impressions, something tells me my opinions aren't going to change much. Zakk got the better end of this deal as far as artistic merits go. Again I apologize for not having this laid out the way I wanted to with a track by track breakdown like last time but it couldn't be helped. Next time I'll paste the text in wordpad instead of relying on blogger to save my work like it's supposed too.