Released in 1995, it would be the last album the band would release for quite some time, but this was because there were already rumors of the classic Black Sabbath line-up reuniting. However, this album was kind of a reunion album in and of itself. When everything was finally ironed out, the line-up would be the same as it was for the album "Tyr" with the return of Cozy Powell on drums and Neil Murray on bass, who replaced GeezerButler, Sabbath's original bassist. Returning from the previous album, "Cross Purposes", is long-timer vocalist Tony Martin, who was by now a familiar face in the Black Sabbath "modern" line-up since he was only beat out by Ozzy as the most faithful vocalist in the band's history. Also Tony Iommi on guitar was back, or course, and so was Geoff Nicholls on keys.
Martin claims he knew nothing about the rumors of a reunion of the classic band or of the plans to bring back Dio for the "Heaven and Hell" band. Also, busy schedules and record company restrictions kept the band from rehearsing or writing songs as a team. Only Iommi, Martin and Nicholls were available to jam together and put the songs together. The album only took 10 days to record because of time constraints, so many things were not possible to work out. The album turns out to be one of the most non-cohesive albums of the band's history, but there are plenty of reasons for that. Martin claims that the songs actually sounded great in practice, but everything got lost in production.
Of course, the next studio album under the name of Black Sabbath would be the one that would redeem the name of the band as it would be the one to unite the classic line-up again in a very successful way, so the band would at least end on a positive note with the album "13" released in 2013. But it would be done at the expense of the loyal Tony Martin and Geoff Nicholls, but that is what we all really wanted, wasn't it?
