Metal, in its lumbering, small-eyed way, has a firm grip on certain basal realities: sin, power, destruction, madness, the gapings of Hell, etc. It’s never far from being relevant, in other words, and Black Rain is particularly on-the-money. Burned out he may be, but even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and Ozzy’s moment of insight has come round again: “Politicians confuse me — I watch the body count rise/Why are the children all marching into the desert to die?” he laments in the title track. “We’ve crossed too many borders/Military suiciiiiiiide.” A serpentine muezzin wail rises over the sound of marching boots, and the song ends in a sequence of distant, toneless detonations. Has nothing changed since Black Sabbath wrote “War Pigs”? Uh, not really. In fact, Sabbath’s ancient millenarian distrust of society now appears rather prescient. And before you dismiss Ozzy’s critique of the Iraq war as heavy-metal buffoonery, you might want to remember that this album is being played right now in Baghdad, in Basra, in tents and in tanks. For a particularly loyal section of the Oz fan base, the tolling bell in Black Rain — a tribute to Mutt’s work on “Hells Bells”? — is no joke at all.
Ozzy is also a family man, and in the two songs on Black Rain addressed to his wife, Sharon (who’s surviving colon cancer), he is at his most McCartneyesque. “Here for You” is all frilly piano and Wings-like strings, “Lay Your World on Me” a full-throated power ballad of manly adoration. Sir Paul, by contrast, and uniquely for his solo career, finds himself on Memory Almost Full without a sweetheart, without a Muse. No Linda, for whom he wrote so many songs of spousal bliss, and no Heather, who is still divorcing him. There is one love song, a low-pulse rocker called “Gratitude,” but I prefer to hear it backwards, as it were — as a horridly sarcastic kiss-off to his soon-to-be-ex-wife. “I’m so grateful for everything/You’ve ever given me/How can I explain what it means to be loved by you . . . ” I could be wrong — Sir Paul is capable of a sentimentalism that reaches, in its upper registers, an almost religious solemnity — but the snarling pseudo-soul spin he puts on the word “gratitude” sounds to me like vengeance. John Lennon wasn’t the only Beatle with a nasty sense of humor.
The lack of a first lady in Sir Paul’s life may account for the muted and introspective tone of Memory Almost Full. Love that title, incidentally — a machine near to crashing, overloaded on experience, slowly chewing its last bytes . . . “When I think that all this stuff/Can make a life/It’s pretty hard to take it in,” he ruminates on “That Was Me.” “Mr. Bellamy” is a nonsense sub-showtune in the vein of “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” from Ram (or ELO’s “The Ballad of Horace Wimp”), but this time it’s darker: the surly protagonist is either perched on a ledge (“I’m not coming down/No matter what you say . . . ”) or having obscure mischiefs, possibly of a psychiatric nature, perpetrated against him (“Sit tight, Mr. Bellamy/This shouldn’t take long”). Not that the album sounds dark at all: Macca the composer seems to be operating at his usual pitch of facility, tossing off tunes that sound at times more idiomatic than melodic. “I’ve got too much on my plate,” runs the first line of “Ever Present Past,” and he sings it in a sort of conversational descending scale, in a manner that seems irrefutably natural and obvious: no other way to do it. Ah, well. He is Paul McCartney. And if the baristas hate him now, they’ll probably get over it.
