What little Sabbath I've listened to in the past has left me largely disinterested going forward, but after working with an old Brit with serious fixation on English hard rock, I thought I'd give it a collegial shot. I'm at least getting through the Ozzy years, after that I'm not promising anything. I'm fairly certain I've never listened to an entire album from start to finish before.
Without further ado:
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Black Sabbath the album, the song, and the band have been studied by metalheads with all the fervor accorded the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Black Sabbath" the song starts off the not-feeling-so-fab four's 1970 debut, and from the moment that its first fearsome notes were unleashed on an unsuspecting public it has remained one of the unshakeable cornerstones of heavy metal. While Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and even earlier gods of noize such as Blue Cheer and Jimi Hendrix are also responsible for the storied future of hard rock and metal, this Birmingham, England, quartet stands apart from its peers on a high mountain peak of doom, cannabis, and the monster riffs that—along with evil T-shirts, volume, and shaggy hair—have fueled a million basement dreams of dark glory. They took the blues out of blues-rock and replaced it with Wagner, creating epic battle rhythms filled with a tension and release. Thanks to Roger Bain's production, Black Sabbath sounds really big and really unhealthy. It's an album that eats hippies for breakfast; also, it has even been statistically determined that if a brain cell were the size of a grain of sand, the amount lost while listening to this record could easily fill the Grand Canyon.
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Black Sabbath's debut album is given over to lengthy songs and suite-like pieces where individual songs blur together and riffs pound away one after another, frequently under extended jams. There isn't much variety in tempo, mood, or the band's simple, blues-derived musical vocabulary, but that's not the point; Sabbath's slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness. Songs like the apocalyptic title track, "N.I.B.," and "The Wizard" make their obsessions with evil and black magic seem like more than just stereotypical heavy metal posturing because of the dim, suffocating musical atmosphere the band frames them in. This blueprint would be refined and occasionally elaborated upon over the band's next few albums, but there are plenty of metal classics already here.
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http://tinyurl.com/3fts7ud
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