Year Of Metal #057: Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
We’ve arrived at the very start, the earliest album on my list. As I noted at the top of this project, I’m not equipped to debate whether this is the LP that launched or invented metal music, but it seems as structurally sound a jumping off point as any. Really, I think the argument could be settled with the very first note played. After some spooky ambient build - scene setting church bells ‘n’ rain - Tony Iommi thwacks the strings of his Gibson SG and sets the template for heavy, doomy, sludgy, stonery gear for years to come.
Iommi’s rightly well regarded as an immensely influential player, but I wonder if he’s still not held in high enough esteem. I can’t think of a lot of guitarists who are so instantly recognisable, so characterful in their work. It’s not even the tone so much that catches the ear with Iommi but the feel, the way those monolithic notes wiggle around, burrowing and lingering in your ear. There is of course the fact that Iommi does play differently to anyone else due to the injury that cost him his fingertips, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to chalk up too much of the heft of his sound to that.
It’s an even more impressive feat that a record so obviously influential can still sound great in its own right. This is best exemplified through the performance of Ozzy Osbourne. Even though he has since become a reality TV star, beloved cultural icon, and ultimately rather infirm old dude who we all hope is being well looked after, he still comes across on record as a sinister, unknowable, charismatic figure of chaos. It beggars belief that he found decades-long gainful employment as a singer (on account of he really isn’t a singer), but there’s also nothing else you could imagine him doing. On standout “N.I.B.” he performs in the guise of Lucifer, and the way he throws himself into it and fully commits is again a benchmark for metal vocalists.
There’s plenty that Sabbath hadn’t quite figured out at this point. On tracks like “The Wizard” and “Wicked World”, they’re deep into the blues riffs that dominated much of British music in the ‘60s. Here they sound far more of their time than on the title track, which is a bold step forward rather than the influence plucking we hear on occasion. They’d soon shake that off, though: the same year they released Black Sabbath, 1970, they’d return with the truly groundbreaking Paranoid, and just a year after that, Master Of Reality, an album I really love.
If this first offering isn’t quite a bonafide classic, it’s more than just a planting of the seeds for things to come. Even the less interesting or more backwards-leaning tracks are buoyed by the incredible eight of these tunes. In the best possible way, there isn’t a smattering of polish on Black Sabbath. It comes through in spades that these are four tearaway lads from the midlands who like loud music, getting stoned, and spooky shit, and if they can chuck all three of those things together, all the better.
