This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
On his last spoken-word CD, punk icon Henry Rollins quips that the weather service should quit naming killer hurricanes after people and start titling them after a far more destructive force — the first four Black Sabbath albums.
He’d likely get no argument from the dozen acts that get in touch with their inner Masters of Reality on this second Sabbath tribute disc. Both nu-metalists like Godsmack (who offer a burning Sweet Leaf) and Machine Head (who head-bang a Hole In The Sky), along with dinosaurs such as Megadeth (who fittingly tackle Never Say Die) and Slayer (who brilliantly brutalize Hand Of Doom) spare no excess to honour Sabbath’s pioneering combo platter of stoned-out Satanism, fuzz-bomb guitars and bone-grinding metal — while updating these tracks for the ’90s with synths, samples and scratching. Ozzy Osbourne himself even gets in the act, lending vocals to Primus’s predictably wonky take on N.I.B. and Busta Rhymes’ rap-metal reworking of Iron Man (from his ’98 album). One quibble: Because the first disc mined most of the band’s classic tunes, some of these tunes are more obscure. Of course, even a minor hurricane still packs one helluva wallop.
