The Devil You Know

Product Information

Butler is usually the band's word man but when Dio comes to town the elfin one gets the job. When one thinks of Dio images of dungeons, dragons, rainbows, etc but with Sabbath he tends to explore tales of good vs evil and moreso his belief that the life one lives now can be 'heaven or hell'. Songs like "Double The Pain", "Fear", "The Turn Of The Screw" and especially "Follow The Tears" are Dio's way of singing the 'blues', albeit with a fighting spirit. me at all. "Breaking Into Heaven" has some eye rolling lyrics (at least for me) but it isn't too bad Tony Iommi 'Putting Riff Ideas Together' For Heaven and Hell Album". Blabbermouth.net. 28 January 2008. Archived from the original on 23 April 2008 . Retrieved 5 June 2008.

The music is mostly played in minor keys, obviously to take advantage of the natural tendency to sound more imposing. The band does do a decent job of staying away from standard verse-chorus-verse structure. This makes the individual songs stand out more and keeps the album from running together. Unfortunately, many of the songs do tend to stay at one speed. Some tempo changes would serve to make the songs stand out even more.These lyrics were typed in myself straight out of the lyrics that appear in the CD booklet. They are accurate except for typos. If you find an error from my transcription let me know, but don’t tell me “the lyrics should be something else”– these are the official lyrics from the liner notes! Ultratop.be – Heaven & Hell – The Devil You Know" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved 10 October 2021.

As a goof, I had a friend of mine who’s good with pixels, uh “fix” the cover art after it was announced. Here’s my “fixed” version. See if you can see what’s different. :) Other than the sinister riffs, another reason this record has such a dark vibe is the fact that it took Dio’s fantastic lyric writing and Sabbath’s general dark imagery to conjure images of demons, fallen angels, and sin, which work together to give the album quite a hellish mood and atmosphere. But despite the quite fantastical imagery, the album still has a very personal edge to it. It’s given to you from such a very real point of view, going in-depth about the emotions, that you can have some sort of relation to it. It also lets the songs that are more purely about emotion and don’t quite have the fantasy element blend right in as well. Heaven & Hell: New Audio Interview With Ronnie James Dio, Geezer Butler Available – Mar. 27, 2009". blabbermouth.net. Archived from the original on 7 May 2012 . Retrieved 30 March 2009.I’m going to echo the sentiment I have heard around here: not enough tempo variation. This was a problem for about the first two-to-three listens, but after I got to know the songs it’s not that big of a deal. Still, a little more variation could have boosted this in my eyes. a b Cohen, Jonathan (10 February 2009). "Heaven & Hell Feeling Devilish on New Album". Billboard . Retrieved 11 February 2009. Honestly, it’s something of a letdown. It is a perfectly good album, but it was a victim of its own hype. The interest in the album had risen to a fever pitch and very few albums could have adequately lived up to that hype. That is not to suggest that it was a bad album, very far from it. It just was not as good as everyone hoped it would be. It took less than three weeks to finish the album, with most of the songs only needing a couple of takes. “It was good to play them live in the studio. It keeps you on edge,” Iommi says. “I mean, somewhere along the line we were gonna have to play them live; might as well start in the studio.” Butler adds: “We’ve learned from the past that you can kill a song doing it over and over. The first Sabbath albums were done in two or three days. Technically they weren’t great, but vibe-wise they were great. If you capture that feeling, that’s all you need.”