Ozzy Osbourne has cheated death so often that Cheater of Death should be one of his official epithets, and while recent reports of his health paint stark pictures of a man close to his demise, on Patient Number 9 he sounds like he’s never been so alive.
Recorded with much of the same team as Ordinary Man -including producer Andrew Watt, Duff McKagan and Chad Smith – this album is the perfect companion to that release, a collection of tightly-written songs that allows Ozzy to work with a bunch of people he both inspired (Mike McCready, Taylor Hawkins) and was inspired by (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck) and apparently have a complete blast as he does it.
Beck shines (because of course he does) with his monumental soloing in the title track and Immortal gives McCready the license to fully embrace his long-latent full-on metal side with a wild lead break. Clapton’s contribution in One of Those Days has him revisiting the sound of Sabbath’s direct ancestor Cream, and neither Zakk nor Iommi disappoint; the latter contributing to both No Escape from Now (where Ozzy’s vocals harken way back to Planet Caravan) and late album highlight Degradation Blues, a deranged heavy blues rock workout with Ozzy on mouth-harp, that appears to be about the dangers of masturbation. It’s one of the more off-beat lyrics on an album that cover Ozzy’s usual infatuations with mental illness, human frailty, the futility of conflict and the madness of those in power.
Regardless of the guys playing on each track, who also include Robert Trujillo and Taylor Hawkins on what would be one of this final studio performances, Ozzy is always the star, giving his all in his desperate wail of a voice, clearly digitally-enhanced on occasion but certainly still powerful and oddly hypnotic as always. The songs move from Sabbath-like sludge behemoths to strings-heavy Beatlesque pop, moving arena rock ballads and the opening rock juggernaut that begins with a kind of Alice Cooper-like theatrical camp, all without hesitation and with nary a dud amongst them.
Like Ordinary Man, this is Ozzy Osbourne clearly in touch with his own mortality but embracing every moment he has left in a breathtaking spurt of late-life creativity and energy. Every time he releases something it’s heralded as possibly his last but it’s also very apparent that Ozzy isn’t about to just give up yet, and this is pretty much his best effort in decades.
