Mob Rules

In 1980, Black Sabbath had just released one of their best albums to date with their new vocalist Ronnie James Dio. The album was called Heaven and Hell, and for anyone who loved their heavy metal to be dark, powerful and wallowing in "prince of darkness" imagry, this was an album that you wore the grooves off.

The following year, Sabbath put out an album that divided fans as much, if not more, than Heaven and Hell brought them together. It was fast, hard and complex but it also was more of an expression of Dio's lyrical interests than he had been allowed to explore before. Everyone in the band, in fact, shaded towards the type of things they loved doing...

The Mob Rules is one of my favorite albums for that very reason. Listen to it, and you can just tell that everyone in the band was going for broke and doing everything exactly the way they wanted. The creativity expressed on that disc was awesome and if you have heard any of the songs played live from that era, you know that they translated well to the stage as well.

Diving in headlong into a creative project is a posture that I ascribe to all the time. I think it's inspiring to put everything you have into a project when you are working with other people committed to doing the same.

Lately, I have been working on Robot 13 with that same abandon...

Hopefully, you'll like finished results as much as I dig Sabbath.

We'll see.

Today's image is from the upcoming Zeros 2 Heroes book Gustav Hayes, with art by Daniel.