LP - Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath - Original UK pressing on Vertigo with Vertigo inner sleeve
Dave - Permanent Records Chicago
" Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal
as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep
Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in
the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal
pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly
recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the
genre. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this
musical revolution -- the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial
nightmare of Birmingham; guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of two fingertips,
which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning
his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath's signature style. These
qualities set the band apart, but they weren't wholly why this debut
album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become
something more. Sabbath's genius was finding the hidden malevolence in
the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. Take
the legendary album-opening title cut. The standard pentatonic blues
scale always added the tritone, or flatted fifth, as the so-called
"blues note"; Sabbath simply extracted it and came up with one of the
simplest yet most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time.
Thematically, most of heavy metal's great lyrical obsessions are not
only here, they're all crammed onto side one. "Black Sabbath," "The
Wizard," "Behind the Wall of Sleep," and "N.I.B." evoke visions of evil,
paganism, and the occult as filtered through horror films and the
writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dennis Wheatley. Even if
the album ended here, it would still be essential listening.
Unfortunately, much of side two is given over to loose blues-rock
jamming learned through Cream, which plays squarely into the band's
limitations. For all his stylistic innovations and strengths as a
composer, Iommi isn't a hugely accomplished soloist. By the end of the
murky, meandering, ten-minute cover of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation's
"Warning," you can already hear him recycling some of the same simple
blues licks he used on side one (plus, the word "warn" never even
appears in the song, because Ozzy Osbourne misheard the original
lyrics). (The British release included another cover, a version of
Crow's "Evil Woman" that doesn't quite pack the muscle of the band's
originals; the American version substituted "Wicked World," which is
much preferred by fans.) But even if the seams are still showing on this
quickly recorded document, Black Sabbath is nonetheless a revolutionary
debut whose distinctive ideas merely await a bit more focus and
development. Henceforth Black Sabbath would forge ahead with a vision
that was wholly theirs." - Allmusic.com
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