Ozzy Osbourne
may well be ripe for mainstream acclaim as a founding father of
heavy metal
, but thankfully
Bat Head Soup: A Tribute to Ozzy
is not one of those increasingly common, cute, and "eclectic"
tribute albums
where bands and artists are seemingly chosen on the basis of how far away they are, musically, from the honoree. Nor is it -- like
Legend of a Madman
,
Ozzified
, and
Land of the Wizard
, the previous
Osbourne
tributes -- an attempt by record labels to showcase the no-name acts on their roster. This one gives the
songbook the full-bore,
hard rock
treatment with a lineup that includes members and ex-members of
Ratt
Kiss
Night Ranger
Poison
Slaughter
Twisted Sister
Judas Priest
, to name just a few. There are more guitar heroes, virtuoso bassists, hotshot session drummers, and '80s wild-child screamers in this lineup than you could shake a dead pigeon at. Most of the covers are, by and large, faithful to the originals, if a little too heavy on the guitar pyrotechnics, but that comes with the territory on an album that features
Paul Gilbert
Reb Beach
Richie Kotzen
Steve Lukather
George Lynch
Doug Aldrich
Dweezil Zappa
Brad Gillis
Yngwie Malmsteen
. On the one hand, the guitar overkill is what keeps the songs from being note-identical copies of the originals; on the other, it is a tiny bit hard to digest after a point if you're not a shred fan. Speaking of shred fans, the entire
Racer X
lineup is present on
"Children of the Grave,"
the only "band" effort on the album (and one of two
Black Sabbath
songs on it, along with
"Paranoid"
) apart from
the Flys
on
"Suicide Solution"
-- the rest are all by supergroups assembled on the fly specially for the tribute. The only really unusual collaboration is
Lisa Loeb
and
doing
"Goodbye to Romance"
-- not bad, no matter what it sounds like on paper. And you also get to hear
Motoerhead
's
Lemmy
singing on
"Desire,"
a song he co-wrote with
for the
No More Tears
album back in 1991. It's pretty obvious that all the artists on this album grew up idolizing
. Often that's transparent in their desire to be impressive, but there are worse faults a tribute album could have. ~ Leslie Mathew