Since the mid-’90s, Ozzy Osbourne has been so famous he only needed to show up. In 1996, by then years removed from his last great album, he launched the annual metal circus that borrowed his name. He soon became an early star of reality television, a lovably mumbling patriarch in a family of salacious misfits. He no longer needed to strive to make great music; he just had to be on time for an annual summer of sets and, like, get really bummed about jogging on his birthday.
Despite becoming a global brand, Osbourne’s solo records have always been surprisingly audacious, as if the man most synonymous with heavy metal itself still had something to prove. And so it goes with Ordinary Man, his first LP in a decade and his finest in two. Produced and co-written by Andrew Watt, the name behind recent pop hits by Cardi B and Justin Bieber, and featuring a murderers’ row of veteran hired guns like Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Ordinary Man is an enormous record. Full of gospel roars, symphonic swells, and massive hooks, the music cuts between doom, pop-punk, and even a little hair metal. Even as Osbourne, now 71 and recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, croons “When I speak my final words/What will it feel like,” he sounds as ambitious as he’s been for half a century.
Osbourne has often flirted with trends without actually chasing them. For 1995’s Ozzmosis, he mined the same sad soulfulness as one of his acolytes, Chris Cornell, whose own more tensile version of Osbourne’s yearning voice made him a superstar. And 2010’s Scream—his most recent studio album, as uneven as a season of The Osbournes—reimagined him for audiences that loved Disturbed or alternative rock. (Aiming for Foo Fighters, he only got close to Collective Soul.) For Ordinary Man, Osbourne and his coterie of co-writers pursue a more conceptual trend: the playlist. These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.
For most of Ordinary Man, that approach provides inspiration for the restless Osbourne. As unlikely as it seems, “Under the Graveyard” is one of the most memorable doom spirituals ever from the singer who practically invented them, the lamentations of a lost soul coiling into a triumphant chorus. Half a plea for the release of death and half a reckoning with the solitude he imagines it will entail, it is a paean to perpetual dissatisfaction—with sobriety or indulgence, life or death, heaven or hell.
Despite the shadow of age, disease, and mortality, there’s childlike glee here, too. “It’s a Raid,” a thrashing hardcore tirade about state surveillance featuring Post Malone, explodes in an ecstasy of rebellion. The irrepressible boast “Straight to Hell” is delightful, if only because of the way Osbourne rhymes “celebrate” with his vow to make you “defecate.” Resist all you’d like, but it’s hard not to smile when he mutters “I’m on the menu/Are you hungry?” like some impudent schoolboy during “Eat Me.” Mining the bluesy sway of Down and a dozen other Sabbath-loving Southerners, the band matches this bravado line by line.
But the lack of focus means that the misses—when Osbourne aims for “November Rain” grandeur or “Iron Man” menace, for instance—are flagrant. A duet with Elton John, the title track is a maudlin ballad about surviving the excesses of fame only to realize you’re going to die, anyway. “I don’t wanna say goodbye/When I do you’ll be all right,” Sir Elton solemnly swears. Pompous and overwrought, the song is so self-serious it mostly makes you glad you’re not a frail old rock star, too, anticipating your own eulogies. “Scary Little Green Men”—a paranoid tantrum about how the aliens are creeping into your mind, bro—awkwardly seesaws between Foreigner-style rhapsodizing and Motörhead-lite browbeating. Noncommittal and unconvincing, this is Ozzy, desperate for topical #content.
That quest for relevance highlights the deepest issue with Ordinary Man, the feeling that haunts you even as you enjoy it. Osbourne has struggled with intelligibility for decades, but he somehow sounds like he’s 25 here, flying and diving inside his historic range like the drinks and drugs never happened. You can’t help but remember the way Rick Rubin captured Johnny Cash or Joe Henry showcased Solomon Burke, showing the wrinkles inside their legendary voices during their final years. Ordinary Man instead feels like a preemptive holographic interpretation of Ozzy, a digital patchwork of his voice standing in for the real thing. He sings about decades of hard living and the nearness of death, but his voice bears no evidence of that wear and tear. Yes, Ozzy sounds great, but that sound leaves you wondering, once again, if he had to show up at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
