Metal
Jørn Lande has told Australia’s Heavy that the invitation to “From The Dark”, the Tony Iommi album out on 23 October through BMG, was for a great deal less than he ended up doing. “From the beginning I was asked if I wanted to contribute to the album and maybe work on a track or two,” the Norwegian singer says.
The first one he cut was “Beyond The Dead”, the fourth of the eight tracks. “Tony loved it, and they all — his manager, everybody — thought this was really a strong track. So, they sent me another one.” The second, he thinks, was “Stormwatcher”, the advance track Iommi put out on 30 September. “After those two tracks, they just decided that [using] one singer [on the entire album] instead of several singers [was the right way to proceed].”
Of “Beyond The Dead” he says it deals with “thoughts about what’s gonna happen after you pass and the kind of despair in that and how you wanna go on and how you’re gonna miss life”.
Lande shares the writing credits on all eight tracks with Iommi. The rest of the line-up is Becky Baldwin on bass and Karl Brazil on drums, and the album is co-produced by Iommi and Mike Exeter. “It’s probably the biggest achievement or every rock singer’s dream, to be able to work with someone like Tony Iommi,” he says. “It’s the godfather.”
“From The Dark” is the third album Iommi has put his own name to, and it arrives twenty-one years after “Fused”. The deluxe CD adds two tracks the guitarist had already released on their own, “Scent Of Dark” and an extended version of “Deified”.
Text by Roger Estivill