Imagine if Black Sabbath had not been the product of the late sixties industrial heartland of England’s West Midlands but had instead found themselves growing up in Detroit! This is the sound that he might have found himselves making. And the fact that this pan-continental, cross-genre shift never happened meant that Sabatta was free to forge a sound that combines doom-riffed heavy-metal and funky grooves, rock intensity and soulful licks, and make it all his own.
It’s classic stuff; it’s just that it sounds like it all comes from different classic songs and different classic styles. The riffs are pure metal, the grooves total funk, the rhythmic verse guitars the sort of thing that Nile Rodgers would have wrestled you to the ground to get his hands on, the soloing Hendrixian and the vocals run from the soulful to the rock solid. And then, the additional combination of the punchy backbeats and the space used to frame the playing makes for a fantastic and impactful delivery indeed.
What Sabatta does so well is take all of these different musical strands, strands which by and large have no truck existing in the same four-minute sonic salvos, and weave them seamlessly into something so deftly done that you will immediately ask yourself, why has no one managed to do this before. Why has no one managed to blend muscle with melody, groove with grit, poise with power into such a fantastic funk-pop, punk-rock sucker punch (now say that again five times, very fast) this well before. Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? The job’s been done. And done brilliantly.
It’s fair to say that just on the strength of this song that Sabatta definitely has his sh— together. Can you honestly say the same?
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