A to Z

BLACK SABBATH

Sabotage: Super Deluxe Edition BMG

8/10

Metal progenitors’ sixth, expanded across four discs

Sabbath’s earliest records were powered by all manner of dark and infernal themes – the Devil, witchcraft, the horrors of war – but the evil that creeps through Sabotage refers to a topic rather more earthbound: lawyers. It was recorded while the band were locked in legal acrimony with their former manager, and the frustration sometimes rises to the surface. “You bought and sold me with your lying words,” cries Ozzy on “The Writ”. This is second-tier Sabbath, arriving at the waning of their imperial phase. But that’s still a formidable prospect, particularly on the choir-assisted “Supertzar” and “Symptom Of The Universe”, a fusion of caveman chug and acoustic guitar filigree. Also included is a mostly unheard North American show from 1975 that proves the band were still bringing the goods live, especially on a surging “Children Of The Grave”.

Extras: 7/10. Liner notes, poster, 1975 Madison Square Garden replica concert book. LOUIS PATTISON

THE BLUETONES

Expecting To Fly EDSEL

7/10

25th-anniversary boxset housing three LPs of blue vinyl

The Bluetones hit the ground running with 1996 debut Expecting To Fly, ousting Oasis from the top of the album charts and occupying the peppier end of the Britpop scale, with clever wordplay and twinkling melodies allied to a congenial charm. Hits “Bluetonic”, “Slight Return” and “Cut Some Rug” still sound like tonics for a damp summer, even if the latter’s poisonous sentiments suggest otherwise. While the quartet aim for the sweet spot between The Stone Roses and ’60s West Coast pop, there is ambition in the spinning psychedelia of “Talking To Clarry” (just one instance of writer Adam Devlin’s heroic guitar work)

THE YARDBIRDS

Yardbirds DEMON MUSIC GROUP

8/10

Five studio Yardbirds. The Jeff Beck lineup try to bottle lightning. By John Robinson

IT was occasionally said in the distant past that getting on in your career wasn’t so much a question of what you knew as who you knew. It’s a small injustice of the 1960s that The Yardbirds, though having known a thing or two, are indeed still more famed for their storied personnel – their band at separate times included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page – than for their own recorded output.

Despite the band’s graduates having sold millions of classic rock albums with music rooted in the British blues boom, the body of work on which theseis like their era: headspinning and confusing, and not always in a good way.