Wow, there’s a new Black Sabbath single, “God Is Dead?” Hallelujah!
As someone who plays in a Black Sabbath tribute band that does over 30 Black Sabbath covers, I have an extra special interest in this song, which I hope my band quickly learns how to play!
While I find the song’s overall structure most similar to “Megalomania”, with its distinct song parts, it’s also fairly dissimilar from that song – the contrast between the two parts of “Megalomania” is quite stark, less so for “God Is Dead?”; there may even be a bit of similarity to the aborted “Scary Dreams” from the post-Reunion sessions that had produced two new recorded songs. “God Is Dead?” starts off like a bunch of familiar Black Sabbath songs, with a combination of a quiet guitar bit and a blast of heaviness (which is spiced up by boomy bass from Geezer), that quickly goes into the verse chorus verse bit of part 1 of the song. Near the middle it enters a bridge, then goes into the regular verse and chorus of part 1; there’s a heavy guitar bridge about two thirds into the song, with some great new verses and nice old Ozzy shouting, with the big “RIGHT!” just before another riff and a solo of less than 20 seconds that is, well, pretty lame. I can only imagine that this is a bit demo-ish, and that the album version will have more solos? Iommi is, of course, a great soloist, and some of his songs have multiple solos (“Into The Void”), long solo outros (“Dirty Women”). The solo for paranoid is an ultra-short solo, of course, but that’s for an ultra-short song.
Overall the song is satisfying for a Black Sabbath song, even if it clearly doesn’t rank with the band’s best output. But it is fairly brave for the band to put out such a long song as their first single. Nobody puts out singles this long, of course, but by giving the fans a big chunk of something to satisfy them I’d say that they’ve really done a great job.
Wow, someone’s already covered it:
Something about this song reminds me just a little bit of Scary Dreams: