Product Code: 19439932811
Artist: Ozzy Osbourne
Origin: EU
Label: Epic / Sony (2022)
Format: LP
Availability: In Stock
Condition:
Cover: M
Record: M
Genre: Hard Rock , Heavy Metal , Rock N

Patient Number 9

Brand new sealed album from Ozzy Osbourne.

The irrepressible rocker offsets his usual forays into the occult with moving contemplations of illness on a star-studded return

‘I’ll never die, because I’m immortal,” sings Ozzy Osbourne on the second track of his 13th solo album. It’s not the last time Patient Number 9 mentions cheating death: “I’m coming out of my grave … you’re going to see my face,” he sings on No Escape from Now, while One of Those Days has him “killing myself – but I never die”. You could say all this seems par for the course, more of the supernatural hokum that has been part of the Ozzy Osbourne brand since Black Sabbath first appeared. There’s a lot of said hokum here, albeit with its tongue more obviously lodged in its cheek than it was 50 odd years ago: Patient Number 9 is an album that comes decorated with pantomime villain cackles, grown men’s voices crying “Mummy! Mummy!” in fear and what sounds like the bad guy in a campy horror flick shouting, “Somebody stop me!” A song that mentions decomposition, meanwhile, concludes with the words, “I loike worms,” in a thick Brummie accent.
Ozzy Osbourne: Patient Number 9 album cover

You can understand why Osbourne might be preoccupied with cheating death or rising from the grave in 2022. It’s not just that he has been plagued by health problems in recent years – Parkinson’s disease and surgeries after a fall at home and to combat nerve pain among them – it’s that every project Osbourne has involved himself in recently has had an air of finality about it. A farewell tour, a reunion album with Black Sabbath motivated by concluding his career with the band “in the right way”, a subsequent Sabbath tour called The End: even Osbourne’s last solo album, 2020’s Ordinary Man, was reviewed as if it was his last. But here he is, two years on and reunited with Ordinary Man producer Andrew Watt, who’s audibly a fan and thoroughly enjoying himself, slathering on the Planet Caravan-esque vocal effects during No Escape from Now and getting Eric Clapton to play on One of Those Days in a wah-pedal heavy style that’s, thrillingly, closer to his work with Cream than his solo oeuvre.