Ozzy Osbourne ‘Ordinary Man’
Album Review By Adam McCann
Sony Music/Heavy Metal
Even a passing fan of heavy metal will know that the last few years have been terrible for Ozzy Osbourne. The Prince of Darkness has struggled with his health culminating in the cancellation of his farewell ‘No More Tours 2’ tour. Alongside these health battles, Ozzy released his first album in decade, finally following up 2010’s ‘Scream’ with his latest and possibly final offering ‘Ordinary Man’.
Ozzy has been teasing songs from ‘Ordinary Man’ for some time now; the title track, alongside ‘Under the Graveyard’ and ‘Straight to Hell’ have left fans rather undecisive and lacklustre with a huge sigh of ‘meh’. Unfortunately, this does transpose into the album, ‘Ordinary Man’ is not an easy album to like; it is almost like Ozzy by numbers, most of the songs are quite ballady with melodies similar to previous tracks such as ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ or ‘Dreamer’ with the rest being quite dull, mid-tempo plods where Ozzy seems to have lost any sort of bite and this is partly down to the lack of Zakk Wylde. Andrew Watt, Slash and Tom Morello are more than a competent replacements for Wylde and Gus G, but it can’t be helped thinking that this is no longer a guitar driven album with the guitar feeling like something which just fills out of the sound rather than a behemoth which helped make the Ozzy name. Furthermore, ‘Ordinary Man’ has the feel of a pop album masquerading as a metal album; there is an exceptionally professional, expensive production on ‘Ordinary Man’ complete with modern mod-cons such as autotune, easy to follow chorus’ and tracks which ‘feature’ other artists such as Travis Scott, Post-Malone and Elton John leading to an overall feeling that this is just not a heavy metal album.
There are some half-decent tracks here, ‘Scary Little Green Men’ and ‘Goodbye’ show flashes of a previous Ozzy, the latter in particularly has a reminiscent overtone of ‘Iron Man’, but overall, none of this is enough to make this album actually fully worth going out to buy. Instead of going out with bang, the future of Ozzy Osbourne seems to be petering out into nothing more a wet fart and that is a horrible shame.
Rating : 44/100
MHF Magazine/Adam McCann
