Sunlight soaked the room red when I heard Black Sabbath for the first time. The one window in my bedroom at ten years old faced west and lined up well with the rising and falling sun. The sun, twice each day, blasted through the floor-length thick crimson curtains covering the window and flooded the room with a red glow. The Castle Communications collection Black Sabbath’s Greatest Hits drew me in thanks to its slightly garish reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and began with “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” on side one. Tony Iommi’s guitar sound, Ozzy Osbourne’s bluesy wail, and the inspired rhythm section attack from bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward gripped my imagination from the first. Iommi’s guttural guitar during the “chorus” for “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” probably first kicked open the door of my musical imagination and it is sheer happenstance I ever saw that cassette sleeve cover long ago.
Happenstance played no part in having my first copy of Paranoid. The eight songs on Black Sabbath’s 1970 sophomore release became the cornerstone of the band’s live shows and it’s easy to hear why. The key tracks, “War Pigs”, “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” are augmented by second tier cuts that, from any other band of the era, deserved consideration as their best work. “Electric Funeral”, “Fairies Wear Boots”, and “Electric Funeral” have all received live airings over the intervening years with great success. The remaining tracks are an instrumental and the inventive, but certainly not hard rock, “Planet Caravan”. There are few truly perfect albums in the rock canon; most contain at least one near or outright miss. Not so with this release. The transition from the first to second album sees a band streamlining their focus, gathering confidence, and building on the debut with a seminal release defining their careers thereafter.
“War Pigs” is a blistering tour de force. Iommi, Butler, and Ward bring the world crashing down on listener’s heads and spare no punches depicting a fallen world slipping into a final darkness. The contrast between the varying guitar passages became a Sabbath staple, but Iommi’s darkly lyrical soloing near the song’s end puts the final exclamation point on the track. “Paranoid” remained the band’s go to closer or encore through multiple incarnations and intervening decades haven’t withered its minimalist, bare fisted power. The lead break and Osbourne’s unhinged, agonized vocal are burned into my brain until I die. “Planet Caravan” is singular in the band’s catalog. This dreamy, lightly psychedelized tracks plays like its wreathed in a marijuana cloud and Ozzy affects a much different voice than normal for the vocal. Musical touches like Iommi’s flute and Bill Ward playing congas creates still carry a certain jolt of surprise, but the band’s original lineup took a lot more musical risks in their heyday than later lineups. The sternum rattling beat kicking off “Iron Man” sets the stage for an iconic Iommi riff. The band’s lyrics never before tackled the assortment of sci-fi tropes comprising “Iron Man”, but the narrative qualities and bell clear themes of alienation solidify the song’s strengths in such a way it’s no stretch to know why this is such an anthem.
“Electric Funeral” is rock music’s Götterdämmerung. Sabbath, for almost five minutes, invokes the reality of nuclear holocaust over a snarling wah-wah soaked Iommi riff. They take the tempo at a slow crawl further drawing out a listener’s dread before the intensity peaks in a hard charging quasi-shuffle near the song’s end. “Hand of Doom” is initially built around Butler’s ominous bass riff and Iommi’s crashing guitar riffs. The lyrics reflect the band’s penchant for writing about their times; references to Vietnam, drug abuse, and Ozzy’s Jeremiah-on-the-mount denunciation of purposefully wasted lives. The steady, swinging build of the instrumental “Rat Salad” acts as an extended introduction for the grinding start-stop churn of “Fairies Wear Boots”. Iommi fires off one furious riff after another while Butler and Ward lay down some hard swagger doubling the guitarist’s lines. It’s a full on gut punch to end one of rock music’s most influential works.
Grade: A+
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