Those albums are a further change of style for Black Sabbath, sporting traits both from the doom and gloom of their early days and the more upbeat, anthemic albums like Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules. I can't think of a single band to compare them to aside from Black Sabbath and offshoot bands featuring members of Black Sabbath, excepting bands that were probably influenced by Black Sabbath. Dehumanizer is also one of their most aggressive albums, which is a relative anomaly in their discography.
Rather than continually treading the same path like many other bands, they definitely underwent a greater stylistic evolution and retained more originality and sense of development than you're willing to admit. The newest album is roughly in the same vein as Dehumanizer, but I don't remember the band claiming that they were going to invent a new style of heavy metal or something. For the most part, they've consistently developed their musical style on nearly every album that they've put out. Most of the Ozzy albums are much closer in sound than the albums that they released without him.
That's a nice way of saying that they're basically reusing most to all of their previous ideas, though I didn't see you point out anything specifically unique about TDYK in relation to their other works. It really sounds to me just like where they left off with their general '90s formula (sans the aggression factor of
Dehumanizer, maybe), with a little more doom thrown in, though not nearly enough to actually qualify as legitimate doom metal since the production is so clean and there's all this pentatonic blah everywhere.
Also, even though you may think the Ozzy albums are more 'samey' than the post-Ozzy ones, the fact is that their guitar-work, drum-work and lyrics were all much more clever on the Ozzy albums. There's a quality to them that just isn't heard on the later material, which is largely marked by repetitive uninflected power chords with minimal interwoven picking, along with static drumming and general over-slickness in sound.
Avoiding simplicity and being complex aren't the same thing. It's fairly obvious that the majority of the material on those albums is hardly more simplistic than just about anything else that they've released. Last time that I checked, Black Sabbath didn't write amazingly complex music. They didn't write simplistic music either. Those albums aren't as obviously melodic and catchy as their earlier music, with Iommi tending to favor a style that emphasizes the epic power of what you referred to yourself as distinctive vocalists.
See above. Black Sabbath are not a complex band, but they
did become much more simplistic - and predictable - after the '70s. There's far less intricacy and progressiveness in their sound now. Seriously, when have they ever released an album in the '80s to '00s with as many twists and turns as in
Sabotage or in songs like "Wheels of Confusion" and "Into the Void"? They just don't put that level of nuance in their music anymore. I really hope this isn't difficult for you to see.
I don't hate music for being catchy. You frequently say put down music that myself and many other people here enjoy for supposedly lacking melodies, probably because their songs aren't as straightforward as you'd like them to be. Not only that, but obvious, straightforward melodies don't define how good a musical composition happens to be, although they seem to be a priority for you.
I know I bitch about lack of catchiness in music a lot, and I do understand that catchiness is not always appropriate, but I certainly do not look for "straightforwardness" in music. I'm receptive to bands like Coil or the Swans (for lack of better examples in my brain at present) which are more subtle and texture-oriented in their melodic structures, but there are a lot of cases where I don't find anything being gained by the use of melodies that are dissonant or random-sounding.
The Devil You Know is one of those cases. It really sounds like they are
trying to be catchy, but simply failing due to lack of ideas.
I really don't get why you would consider this album "subtler" or "less obvious" because of these melodies. It's an incredibly straightforward album. This isn't friggin' experimental post-rock we're talking about here. It's Black Sabbath. They're reknowned for their classic riffs and guitar work. Catchiness is one of the central features (or aims) in nearly all of their discography. They've been this way forever, and TDYK does not express any clear change in musical direction as far as I can tell.
Considering how much emphasis they give on clear production, and the prominent place that the vocals and guitar have on the album, I don't see how they would be striving for much of anything other than catchiness. It really just boggles my mind that you would hold up THIS of all albums as a worthy example of subtle, textured, "non-obvious" music.
I'm being completely serious, because you claimed that Sabbath made a bunch of generic albums that all sound the same. Besides, I don't really listen to Motörhead, so I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care. AC/DC's bluesy brand of foot-stompin', riff-driven, three-chord hard rock wasn't particularly original, unless you're unaware of the existence of The Rolling Stones and the many bands that followed them. They aren't a clone of The Stones, but they don't really do anything that you can't hear on their classic albums. I'd also have to say that The Stones were better and more varied in their approach and had a much more bearable vocalist in Mick Jagger.
I'm tired of typing, so I'll let you have the final say here.
