Black Sabbath

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Essential Albums

  • Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
    Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
    Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

    Maybe there’s something about working in a haunted castle that brings out the best in musicians. Written in the dungeon at Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is arguably Black Sabbath’s masterwork. Sure, the band members were occasionally spooked by the female ghost that reportedly occupied the premises, but that’s a small price to pay for greatness. Released in the fall of 1973, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was, at the time, the band’s most musically intricate and lyrically advanced album—the sound of four musicians maturing as musicians and writers, even while drowning in the booze and cocaine that would prove their undoing. “Living just for dying, dying just for you,” bassist Geezer Butler writes in the immortal title track and album’s sole single. It’s an acknowledgement of the band’s self-destructive lifestyle, brought on by the pressures of fame, success, and—let’s face it—the band’s own choices. It’s a theme that Butler and his bandmates would echo on the underrated banger “Killing Yourself to Live,” which the bassist wrote while hospitalized for a kidney ailment brought on by excessive partying. The title track riff, though? It’s unstoppable. Guitarist Tony Iommi has called it “the riff that saved Black Sabbath” because it was the first thing he came up with for the album after suffering an extended and uncharacteristic bout of writer’s block. Meanwhile, Ozzy’s proclamation of “You bastards!” assaults the assaulters, the corporate overlords, and quasi-religious snake oil salesmen who manipulate mankind for sport and profit. Elsewhere on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the hugely hypnotic “A National Acrobat” and meticulously bombastic “Spiral Architect” explore, respectively, the intricacies of conception and DNA. Butler may have told Sabbath biographer Mick Wall that the former is “a song about wanking…from the sperm’s point of view,” but lines like “I’ve lived a thousand times, I found out what it means to be believed” reveal a deeper, more philosophical perspective. “Fluff,” meanwhile, is the longest and most complex of the instrumental pieces that Iommi had begun including on Sabbath albums, starting with 1971’s Master of Reality (the title is a nod to DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman, one of the few DJs to play Sabbath on the air back in those days). The infectious and proggy “Sabbra Cadabra” features some impromptu lines from Ozzy, apparently based on inane voice-over dialogue from the German porn he was into at the time. The song also includes extensive piano and mini-Moog embellishments, courtesy of Yes keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman; as legend has it, he played on the track in exchange for a case of beer. Ozzy later declared Sabbath Bloody Sabbath to be the band’s “final record,” even though they recorded three more with him before giving him the sack. That statement may sell 1975’s Sabotage a bit short—but it says much about the record at hand.

  • Master of Reality
    Master of Reality
    Master of Reality

    Early Sabbath’s apocalyptic vision reaches a fever pitch on what is arguably their finest hour: 1971’s Master of Reality. The tectonic-scale heaviness of “Children of the Grave,” “Into the Void,” and “Sweet Leaf” gave birth to an entirely new vibe in rock. Ozzy completes the wicked package with incantatory lyrics that belie a young dude whose psyche has been shredded by Christianity, social alienation, and the looming threat of global thermonuclear war. Don’t skip over the ballad “Solitude”—it’s the gloomiest of them all.

  • Paranoid
    Paranoid
    Paranoid

    If any album signaled the definitive end of the ’60s, it was Paranoid. Gone were the flower children, peace chants, and Day-Glo paint; in came monumental, vicious guitar riffs, Ozzy Osbourne’s snarling twist of a voice, and stories of doom, drug addiction, and death. It wasn’t always this way, of course: Confirmed Beatles fans, Sabbath’s members had their psychedelic period. But by the late ’60s, the death toll in Vietnam was rising, the band’s native Birmingham remained studded with World War II bomb sites, and these blue-collar boys saw only mind-dulling factory work ahead of them. Out of that despair came this furious, uncompromising record. Despite critics’ misreading of the album as a Satanic screed (a perception Sabbath played up), the album in fact contained searing indictments of the elite. “War Pigs”—meant at one point to be the album’s title track—opens with air-raid sirens and ultimately envisions the evisceration of warmongering politicians. “Iron Man,” bearing one of the most recognizable guitar riffs on the planet, is told from the perspective of a man who, after being blasted into space, has seen humanity’s grim future but is unable to communicate it upon his return. “Hand of Doom” deals with heroin addiction among soldiers, while “Paranoid” traffics in depression. This is heavy subject matter, and the band developed a musical vocabulary to match it, with ponderous drums and scowling guitars that felt light-years away from, say, CSN&Y. Many critics found the songs overly theatrical, but the public was ravenous for them. Within just over two years, Black Sabbath released four albums and birthed something much bigger than themselves: heavy metal. Paranoid remains the diabolical wellspring from which innumerable bands—and many metal subgenres—have sprung.

  • Black Sabbath
    Black Sabbath
    Black Sabbath

    When he was 17 years old, a young guitarist, born Frank Anthony Iommi, sliced the tips off two of his fingers while working at a sheet metal factory in Birmingham. The story goes that he was so determined to keep playing guitar, he fashioned prosthetic tips out of melted plastic bottles and detuned his guitar by a minor third because the looser strings were easier to play. Three years later, that ominous detuned tone would form the backbone of Black Sabbath’s sound. And it happened almost entirely by accident. It’s not that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal. By the end of the 1960s, genre co-pioneers Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin had already begun unleashing distortion, riffs, and solos on a generation still enamored with folk and early psychedelia. But it took a different kind of heaviness—the kind inspired by horror films, the occult, and a bleak working-class upbringing in Aston, Birmingham—to give heavy metal its true form. Enter four twenty-something blokes and the debut album they recorded in 12 hours. Much like the horror genre (the band name itself was stolen from a 1963 Italian anthology by “Master of the Macabre” Mario Bava), these songs were generally designed to incite fear, terror, suspense, excitement. First, the scene is set: a dark and stormy night. Heavy rain, thunder, and creepy church bells lay the foundation of “Black Sabbath” (the first song on Black Sabbath’s first album, Black Sabbath). It’s almost 40 seconds before the guitar riff strikes. Soon, Ozzy Osbourne starts singing about a mysterious “figure in black” pointing and staring at him—the lyrics were inspired by a vision bassist Geezer Butler had experienced in his room, then painted completely black, decorated with occultist books and satanic images. A few lines later comes Osbourne’s very first ungodly howl: “Oh, no, no, please, God help me.” It’s a song so intense and demonic, it not only terrified and intrigued millions, it instantly created the doom metal subgenre and led to countless Sabbath-worshipper attempts to emulate its impact ever since. Despite the hasty recording session, an incredible level of creativity went into the stories behind these songs. Led Zeppelin might be the biggest Tolkien fanatics in rock, but Iommi, who was reading Lord of the Rings at the time, found inspiration for “The Wizard” in Gandalf: “Evil power disappears, demons worry when the wizard is near/He turns tears into joy, everyone's happy when the wizard walks by.” “Behind the Wall of Sleep” pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft, and “N.I.B.” is a twisted, Cream-inspired love song from the perspective of Lucifer himself. Black Sabbath was, appropriately, released on Friday the 13th in February 1970, and, despite being panned by critics, became so successful that they returned to the studio just four months later to record Paranoid.

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About Black Sabbath

It’s simple, really: no Black Sabbath, no heavy metal. The Birmingham quartet may have risen from the British blues-rock boom of the late ‘60s, but their sledgehammer riffs and bulldozer rhythms exuded an apocalyptic aura that spawned a whole new kind of devil’s music. The doomy tritone riff that opens their 1970 self-titled debut pried open the crypt leading to rock’s netherworld, summoning the inimitable voice of Ozzy Osbourne, who traded the chest-puffing, girl-crazy machismo of the typical hard-rock frontman for the dread-ridden delivery that could only come from a working-class kid raised in a no-hope industrial town. Black Sabbath’s bleak outlook was ultimately a reflection of the world around them: The blistering title track to 1970’s Paranoid provided an unflinching admission of mental illness that was virtually unheard of in rock music at the time, while the immortal “War Pigs” was a more damning indictment of the Vietnam War than anything coming out of the hippie movement. But guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler packaged these dark thoughts in the sort of riffs that were so infectious, they practically qualify as pop earworms—the most tone-deaf hesher could blurt out “duhn-duhn DUH-NUH-NUH” and you’d instantly recognize it as the intro to eternal stoner anthem “Sweet Leaf.” After Ozzy’s substance-abuse issues forced his ousting in 1979, Sabbath recruited glass-shattering vocalist Ronnie James Dio for two albums (Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules) that anticipated both the fearsome velocity and theatrical flamboyance of ‘80s metal—and presaged decades of rotating members, reunion tours, and parallel line-ups. But in 2013, Ozzy teamed up with Iommi and Butler for their first album together in 35 years, 13, a chart-topping, Grammy-winning comeback that proved, for all their imitators and offshoots, there can be only one Black Sabbath to rule them all.

ORIGIN
Birmingham, England
FORMED
1968
GENRE
Metal

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