"Rewind the future to the past," sings Ozzy Osbourne on the opening track of 13. It's a neat summation of what the first Black Sabbath album to feature Osbourne for 35 years attempts to do. Indeed, it's a neat summation of what every legendary band who've not just reformed, but also re-entered the studio over the last decade or so, have attempted to do. It's just that most of them haven't been as open about it as Sabbath, tending to couch their new material in talk about progression and suggesting they are moving forward into hitherto-uncharted musical territories. In fairness, producer Rick Rubin made a game attempt to suggest that the intentions behind 13 were "not retro", alas a little undermined by the fact that the next thing he said was: "If this had come out in 1972, I think people would have loved it." Nonplussed, bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler revealed that, in the studio, Rubin had played their eponymous 1970 debut and announced that the band should "unlearn everything" from the subsequent 43 years: "That was his thing. Pretend this is your second album."
But in Black Sabbath's case, rewinding to the past is a big ask. Aside from Tony Iommi's downtuned guitar and the malevolence of Butler's lyrics, the thing that set them apart from such peers as they had in the early 70s was the almost tangible sense of desperation that hung over their music. You didn't have to have read Osbourne's dismal pre-Sabbath CV of petty theft and dead-end jobs to know that he wasn't a man overburdened with options: you could tell by the way he sang, that desolate wail. The rest of Black Sabbath matched him: on their debut album and 1970's Paranoid, they sounded, to borrow Tony Wilson's famous line about Joy Division, like people who were in a band because they had no choice. Even at the height of their success, something of the underdog clung to them. That was partly because of the sheer critical opprobrium they faced. "Any third-rate support act has a better chance of getting an album track played on Sounds of the Seventies or Whistle Test, or even a moderately sympathetic write-up in the music weeklies," noted one critic in 1973. But it was also because, like Dr Feelgood's Lee Brilleaux, Black Sabbath seemed to believe that rock'n'roll was fundamentally "music about bad luck", a conviction they clung to in the teeth of vast commercial success. Indeed, if you'd only paid attention to their lyrics and not the enthusiasm with which the band's members availed themselves of fame's spoils, you would have thought vast commercial success brought Black Sabbath nothing but alienation, despair and joyless nihilism: it's never mentioned in the same breath, but 1975's Sabotage paints a picture of drugged-out superstardom every bit as grim as Nirvana's In Utero.
But it's hard to view Black Sabbath as underdogs today. With the band unimpeachably revered, the circumstances that birthed those albums are impossible to recreate, no matter how many signifiers of the classic Sabbath sound you gather together – and 13 pretty much collects the set, from tolling bells and thunder to Zeitgeist's fantastic, Planet Caravan-ish shimmer of acoustic guitar, bongos and effects-heavy vocal. The only thing conspicuous by its absence is Bill Ward's drumming. Drafted in after Ward quit over contractual disputes, Rage Against the Machine's Brad Wilks is no bad drummer, but he can't match the weird, jazz-inspired swing Ward brought to even the most dirge-paced tracks; possibly no one can.
At its least appealing, as on God Is Dead?, 13 sounds like a band struggling to locate their old sense of menace. The scenery's very realistic, but you're always acutely aware you're in the presence of people putting on an act: close, but no metaphorical descent into the bowels of Hades fuelled by crushing existential despair. It's perhaps compounded by Rubin's production. At a time when artists seem to be increasingly leaning towards an old-fashioned, analogue approach, Osbourne has praised Rubin's use of Pro-Tools as a signifier of 13's modernity. Whether that's the reason or not, the sound lacks some of the primitive, brutal edge of Sabbath's early-70s recordings. End of the Beginning's journey from oozing sludge to a crashing, epic, surprisingly melodic finale – Osbourne's voice battling for space with Iommi's wailing guitar solo – would be fantastic if it didn't feel too brightly, glossily rendered.
At other moments, however, you're glad of Rubin's presence. For all Butler's confusion at his "unlearn everything" approach, on the fantastic Damaged Soul, the producer seems to have succeeded in his aim. It sees past the Godfathers of Metal tag, returning them to their roots, in a thrillingly grim area between the late-60s blues revival and the last bitter dregs of psychedelia: a kind of curdled Cream. Moreover, somewhere on the way back, they seem to have recovered the urgency and edge that originally drove them.
You can hear the same urgency and drive elsewhere. If it isn't down to Rubin's methods, then perhaps the misery visited on the band during the writing and recording sessions – Iommi's announcement that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, Ward's departure, the Osbourne family's health issues and the singer's 18-month relapse into alcoholism and drug use – had something to do with it. "I always knew that there'd be trouble," sings Osbourne, glumly, on Age of Reason, before Iommi breaks into a lengthy, anguished-sounding solo. Dear Father finds a focus for Sabbath's patent would-you-like-to-see-the-Pope-on-the-end-of-a-rope religion-baiting in the Catholic church's child abuse scandal: there's something chilling about Osbourne's numb delivery and something very potent about the moment when the music gathers pace and his voice cracks into a anguished rasp.
It ends with the aforementioned thunderstorm and tolling bell: the way their debut album began, giving 13 a sense of finality. In contrast to the usual reformed legends' bluster about their new work being the best of their career, Osbourne has talked, a little more realistically, about wanting to end his recording career with Black Sabbath "the right way", as opposed to with 1978's Never Say Die, an album he was too incapacitated even to finish. For all 13's flaws, it would be churlish to suggest they haven't succeeded in that aim.
