This came out in 2005 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Even Ozzy Osbourne has had enough of Ozzy Osbourne. “To be honest,” writes the old bat-biter in the liner notes to his new box set, “I wasn’t terribly happy about the prospect of repackaging and reissuing another compilation of the same songs you can get on another one of my albums.”
Of course, he wasn’t unhappy enough not to do it. So, despite Osbourne’s supposed misgivings, we now have the four-disc box Prince Of Darkness in all its faded glory. But give the Ozzman partial credit; while he may not have been able to prevent this umpteenth compilation from being foisted on the faithful, he has apparently tried to make sure it’s at least half interesting.
Rather, he’s tried to make sure at least half of it is interesting. The second half, to be precise. The first two discs of this 52-song set have all the tracks you’d expect an Ozzy box to contain — from early hits like I Don’t Know, Mr. Crowley and Crazy Train to more recent standouts like No More Tears and Dreamer. They might not necessarily be the versions you expect; instead of just regurgitating the studio cuts, the set draws extensively from live albums like Ultimate Sin and Tribute. There are also a handful of demos — See You On The Other Side, Mama, I’m Coming Home, I Don’t Want To Change The World and others — tossed in for variety.
For real variety, though, skip straight to Disc 3, a collection of assorted collaborations and duets drawn from soundtracks, tribute discs and other various sources. A lot of it is fairly standard stuff, like a version of Iron Man featuring Irish rockers Therapy? or a cover of N.I.B. with rubbery funk-punks Primus. Some cuts are legitimately cool, though, like the golden-throat duet with Lemmy on I Ain’t No Nice Guy and the funk-metal of Therapy, co-starring Infectious Grooves. Others are weird enough to be almost cool, like a couple of rap-metal collaborations with The Wu-Tang Clan (“I’m not sure I even know who the f— The Wu-Tang Clan are,” admits Ozzy) and a cover of The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive recorded with second-generation guitar slinger Dweezil Zappa. And of course, some are just plain wrong, like a cartoonish cover of Born To Be Wild with (I wish I were kidding) Miss Piggy.
The oddball covers don’t stop there. Disc 4 delivers another 10 of them — all newly recorded versions of ’60s and ’70s hits. Once again, it’s a mixed bag. The rockier numbers — King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man, Mountain’s Mississippi Queen (with cowbell!), Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes (with a barking Ian Hunter!) — tend to be listenable. But does the world really need Ozzified versions of Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth, The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, The Beatles’ In My Life and John Lennon’s Working Class Hero? Just for the record, that was a rhetorical question.
Here’s a more practical query: Exactly who is the target audience for Prince Of Darkness? In the end it’s hard to tell. Newbies and hit-seekers certainly won’t find a definitive career chronicle here. Completists won’t find quite enough buried treasure to justify the outlay — there are only four unreleased cuts aside from the new tracks, and one of them is the 53-second theme song to TV reality show Dog The Bounty Hunter. Fanatical completists and collectors have probably heard enough of this stuff already.
And by the time the set simpers to a close with Ozzy and Kelly’s dreadful father-and-daughter duet on Changes, chances are you’ll have heard enough too — and had enough of Ozzy Osbourne for a while.
