And...a good venue (WAMU Theatre, Seattle). it's intimate enough, not hard to get good tix, and a good crowd. Between my fellow atendee and I there's a good seventy years experience of involvement in music from collecting to production and this was our joint opinion:
In all those years Dio has lost nothing vocally. I suppose that's technically impossible, but his voice is still instantly recognizable, he's still as energetic as ever, and his range doesn't SEEM to have suffered.
It was a pleasure just to hear Tony Iommi craft his power chord sound around Geezer Butler's assaultive bass. Vinny Appice was SOLID! My friend said it was certainly the best version of "Heaven & Hell" that HE'D ever heard, and he still has the vinyl.
Biggest disappointment of the YEAR....not getting to see Coheed & Cambria...we're both BIG fans.
Neurosis was certainly competent pummeling metal, but served mostly as background for beer garden conversation and comparing old-school Black Sabbath t-shirts. (Mine WAS, but still Ozzy-era.) Not much here of the younger, pierced crowd.
Between us, we gave it four "devil signs"