When a Latin-funk band suddenly decides to release an album covering iconic metal act , it certainly takes some time to win over both funk and metal fans. But of all the people out there who might be listening, there’s one person above everyone else would want the approval of: Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne.
What would Ozzy think of bongos cheerfully bubbling beneath the guitar solo on “N.I.B.” or a horn section alongside the quintessential “Iron Man” riff?
It turns out, as the band learned last summer, Osbourne loves it.
“A friend of ours listens to satellite radio and actually caught an interview with Ozzy and Sharon and we checked it out,” said Brownout guitarist Beto Martinez, who plays the first -curated show of 2015 at the on Feb. 24. “Sharon’s like, ‘Ozzy what are you listening to these days?’ and he says, ‘Oh, yes, Brown Sabbath I love this. This Mexican guy sounds just like me — itap great.’”
Spurred by the enthusiastic response to the project (from Osbourne to funk fans to total metal heads), Brownout has spent the last year touring in support of its latest album “Brownout Presents ,” a collection of funkified Black Sabbath covers. The band has found itself in a position that would have seemed downright crazy a few years ago.
For more than a decade Brownout has made a career for itself as one of Austin, Texas’s finest Latin-funk exports — mixing psych, jam, cumbia and jazz on six releases of original tunes. But when prepping for a themed show in September of 2013, the band members came up with an unconventional idea: mixing their fusion sound with the seminal English metal act.
With a week to prep for that first show, the band quickly found out that the styles have more in common than one might originally think.
“Once we started working on it, we realized that Black Sabbath is really funky music and it wasn’t too far of a stretch to put our own arrangements on it,” Martinez said. “I think it gets overlooked. The Sabbath rhythm section definitely had this funkiness, and they were coming from this jazz and R&B background. Itap definitely always been there and people always focus on the riffs and forget that it is really funky.”
At first, Martinez said, there was some skepticism from both metal fans and their longtime fans. But soon enough, people started to come around and the band noticed their live shows start to bring in a rather interesting crowd.
“We have this whole other contingent (of fans at concerts) that are metal heads who love Sabbath and only show up because they see the word Sabbath,” Martinez said. “They don’t know what Brownout does and thatap actually the part of the crowd that scared us the most. We’d look out there and go, ‘These people are just here because of Sabbath so we have to impress them.’ And I think we’ve really won them over.”
In a sense, Brownout has become a sort of conduit between the seemingly unconnected worlds of these genres.
“We are introducing some people to something new. There is a metal contingent that definitely isn’t into funk. You can tell who’s not into funk with how they’re dressed,” Martinez said. “Hopefully we are because music is universal and itap really great to transcend scenes.”
So, why Black Sabbath music? Martinez says that the band members grew up with metal music, and they like to joke that they’re living out their high school dream of playing in a metal band.
“A handful of us are Latino and itap definitely something that we grew up with. Metal is a scene in the Latino community that is definitely embraced,” Martinez said. “The styles — latin music, funk music and metal — they all meet somewhere with Latinos for some reason.”
After the success of the metal experiment, Brownout is beginning to think of what its next move might be as a band: Do something else surprising? Go back to its funk roots? Continue with the metal music?
The answer, they’ve decided, is to record funk music as Brownout, with a bit of a harder edge.
“We definitely have a lot of people who want to hear a Brown Sabbath album. We love doing it, but we don’t want to overstay our welcome,” Martinez said. “We don’t want to just become this forever because we have a history, you know, we have 10 years of playing and putting out albums of original music.”
“It’ll be a big surprise to see what comes up next year.”
And who knows, if Brownout keeps taking risks, maybe in a few years time Jay-Z will be saying he loves the band. Stranger things have happened.
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