OK here’s the scenario, you cut sixteen badass tracks, tour, work your asses off and possibly were the world’s first Black Sabbath tribute band (they played the entire first Sabbath album during live performances) and on top of that presented the first live recording of Sabbath which was recorded by Alex Wilson, bassist for Scotland’s Iron Claw. And what was their reward for all that hard work and effort? Almost forty (40!) years between the recording and release of some really good hard , heavy asskickin’ music ( are you kidding me!) I mean WTF!

       Whew, enough ranting (for now) these guys Iron Claw, who got the name from a lyric from King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” are represented well on this record or CD or whatever the hell it’s on (finally!).

     The album moves chronologically and you hear the difference as the years progress. The first five tunes are definitely from the Sabbath school, with titles like Clawstrophobia, Sabotage, Crossrocker and Skullcrusher how could you possibly go wrong!? And guitarist Jimmy Ronnie delivers the goods on these, hell all the tracks but they coulda done without the flute and smellotron on some of the later tunes. Never really understood the reason for mellotron in hard rock.

     The bottom line here is it’s a cryin’ shame it took so long to release such a beautiful slab of pure metallic hard rock, oh snap they released an album of new material in 2010 “A Different Game” which I’m definitely gonna check out and not take 40 years to do it!

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"Sixteen pulverizingly heavy early masterpieces of dirty doom metal, this is a can't miss package for all fans of heavy psych, proto-metal and the early days of doom rock." - The Ripple Effect

"This Scottish band are just ridiculously heavy and I think it's a travesty that the sixteen songs they wrote around 1970/1971 never got an official release until 2009. This whole album is just breathtaking." - Terrorizer

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