Black Rain is the tenth studio album by Ozzy Osbourne, and his highest-selling record to date. It’s been labelled by critics as his most “serious” solo offering, recorded with Zakk Wylde and Mike Bordin, familiar collaborators to the ‘Prince of Darkness’.
In an interview with Billboard Magazine leading up to the album’s release, Osbourne admitted, “I thought I’d never write again without any stimulation … But you know what? Instead of picking up the bottle I just got honest and said, ‘I don’t want my life to go to pieces’”.
Maybe the heavy-metal afficionado’s sobriety is what lends a more sullen quality to this record, making for a 10-track fuzz fest that is deftly audacious. But if we’re being honest, austerity isn’t the only defining feature of Black Rain – it’s transformation too.
Every Ozzy Osbourne album sticks to a certain set of rules: heavy guitar, statement hooks, growling vox, brooding melodies, but what made Black Rain different from anything else in his discography was its easy likeability. Considering that the genre of music he makes is notoriously anti-pop, tracks like “Not Going Away” and “I Don’t Wanna Stop” are surprisingly comprehensible, built around simple basslines and dare I say, catchy chorus-lines.
There’s something less rebellious about Black Rain, erring on the side of generic song writing, and it had listeners divided – some were displeased by the mid-tempo pop rock that loomed large over the record, others fascinated by it, enjoying the fact that they could now listen to an Ozzy Osbourne album with the same nonchalance they would a Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
Take the title track, with its bluesy, Western-style opening and its ceremonial drumming, or “Here For You” and its piano tinges of west-coast rock – they’re arena-made ballads, Osbourne’s voice pushed through so many layers of vocal production it sounds almost like someone else. And that, I think, was his intention all along – to depart from his old ways, to make a run for new territory. Was the result ground-breaking? No. Was it the start of a new chapter in his career? Possibly.
Osbourne took a ten-year hiatus not long after the release of Black Rain, making a comeback in 2020 with Ordinary Man. The record was produced and co-written by Andrew Watt, a well-known figure in the world of pop and R&B, having worked with the likes of Cardi B and Justin Bieber. There’s even a track on the album that features Post Malone, and it honestly came as no surprise that Osbourne was finally snuggling up to pop so openly – Black Rain was the ticket there, shamelessly the same.
We’ll never quite know why Osbourne decided to take a left-turn, but it paid off. Everything he’s released since 2007 has flashed with modern relevance, reaffirming the now 73-year-old’s legend status, and he owes most of that success to the groundwork laid by Black Rain. It all started with him putting down the bottle, and while you might call it a foundational album of sorts, it was also a necessary step in the ladder towards transformation.