Black Sabbath

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Essential Albums

  • Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
    Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

    Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was Black Sabbath’s most intricate album to date. The band returned to Los Angeles, where they’d recorded their previous album, Vol. 4—but guitarist Tony Iommi, the man responsible for writing the band’s indelible riffs, encountered writer’s block. It wasn’t until the band returned to the U.K. and began rehearsing in the dungeon of Clearwater Castle that the vibe was right; the title track came to him, and the album began to flow. Again Iommi nailed it, with songs such as “A National Acrobat,” “Sabbra Cadabra,” “Killing Yourself to Live,” and “Spiral Architect” all featuring catchy but powerful guitar hooks that took Sabbath further than the first three albums. While bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward still played in lockstep, Iommi multitracked his guitar parts for greater effect. The acoustic “Fluff” showed their gentle side, while the addition of Yes’ Rick Wakeman on piano and mini-moog for “Sabbra Cadabra” created a new sound dimension never before associated with the band. The lyrics, however, were showing signs of the band’s condition after years of excessive partying. 

  • 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

    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

    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.

HOMETOWN
Birmingham, England
FORMED
1968

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