IOMMI - Doomed?
by Martin Popoff
Don't know if you've noticed this with us, but if an important record blows by and gets a little old on the racks, without us getting an interview and thus a feature together, we usually obsess over the stretched timing and move on. But Fused (out since mid-summer, on Sanctuary), the collaboration between Tony Iommi and Glenn Hughes, is such a well-regarded collection of ironically bright "doom" anthems, we figured we'd persist in tracking down Tony, and get a few words from him about the situation.
"Yeah, it's quite different, the whole thing, the way it was written and everything," muses Tony. "When we'd first done the DEP Sessions (also released by Sanctuary, almost exactly a year ago as you read this), they were done basically at my house, just writing material to see what sort of thing we would do. It wasn't particularly for Glenn and I; we were just writing stuff, maybe for other people, you know. So we weren't really intending on releasing that at first. And with the Fused album, it was done to be a band, to be so we could record it live. We wanted to write it, rehearse it, and record it live, by the band that we're going to go out and tour with."
Fused is chock-full of Tony's slow, lumbering riffs, as I say, shined up brightly, both by the sharp twang of Glenn Hughes' breathtaking vocals, as well as the sterling production of Bob Marlette and the precise yet groovy and cymbal-smashing drumming of Kenny Aronoff, huge studio legend but best known for his work with John Mellencamp.
