13

Iommi occasionally apes Slayer's squealing solos, but otherwise this is vintage Sabbathian, slow-grind all the way. [Jul 2013, p.82]

It is a bit Sabbath-by-numbers, but given the weight of history (it's their first studio album together in 35 years), you can see why they would kind of back into the thing.

13 is ultimately a solid, back-to-basics return that proves Black Sabbath is still the exemplary blueprint for heavy metal.

It sounds like a Sabbath album, from the tortuous lyrics to the eight-minute track lengths. But something about it feels wrong.

Black Sabbath's first album with Ozzy Osbourne since 1978 is bluesier, leaner and substantially less cringe-making than a great many reunion cash jobs.

With the hard-hitting yet loose-limbed playing of Rage Against the Machine drummer Brad Wilk, there is a real sense of top professionals at work.... Osbourne’s singing, by contrast, is strangely unexpressive, perhaps because there is no real possibility of emotional connection with lyrics that strain for grandiose effect but are flattened by clunking phrases and trite rhyming schemes.

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.

The head of steam 13 builds in its second half flattens with “Dear Father,” which concludes the album with an anticlimactic plop.