Tony Iommi has a fourth solo album coming on 23 October through BMG. From the Dark is eight tracks long and it is the first thing under his own name since Fused, the 2005 record he made with Glenn Hughes, which puts twenty one years between the two.
Jorn Lande sings on the album and shares a writing credit on every song. Becky Baldwin plays bass, Karl Brazil plays drums, and Iommi co-produced with Mike Exeter, who has engineered and produced for him since the Heaven and Hell years. World Alone went out as the lead single in the summer, backed on a limited seven inch with an instrumental version of itself. Stormwatcher is the one that surfaced this week, and it sits at the centre of the running order.
The tracklist runs Over the Violent Sun, Black Times, World Alone, Beyond the Dead, Stormwatcher, Death Wake, Return of the Arbalist and Legacy, the longest of them just past seven minutes. A deluxe CD adds Scent Of Dark and Deified.
The casting is the thing worth registering. Lande is a power metal singer by trade, which is not the register Hughes brought to Fused and not the register of any of the singers who stood in front of Black Sabbath in the fifty six years since the first album. He is also the only vocalist on this one, start to finish. Iommi has been in the news this year for reasons that had nothing to do with records, and this is the first album to arrive alongside them.