Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
Released on Friday 13th in February 1970, this is a fitting date given the lyrics, subject matter and endless imitators that it spawned. As if that wasn’t enough, the band, album and first song take their name from a 1963 Boris Karloff horror film. I’m only surprised they didn’t have Ray Reardon on the cover.
I love the rain and thunder sound at the start of this – it reminds me of a couple of rain sound tracks I use to get me asleep sometimes. A really good atmospheric start, a track that knows the value of the space between the notes and Ozzy’s voice is suitably menacing. When he sings “Oh no, no please God help me!” it’s a little unsettling, giving you the impression that he’s seeing something that we are not. And then the guitar that brings the track home is great.
"The Wizard" displays the music’s roots with its blues guitar and harmonica but there’s some nice heavy chords as well and this heavy guitar sound carries through the rest of the album. Tony Iommi's guitar riff that caries “N.I.B.” sounds like it might have laid down the template that J.J.Cale would adapt for “Cocaine” six years later.
"Sleeping Village" has an atmospheric opening with the acoustic, and the jew’s harp made it sound like the start of an Ennio Morricone epic, but elsewhere I felt that the album started to feel bitty. "Evil Woman" is a bit repetitive and didn’t have the spark of some of the other songs and for all the fabulous guitar littered across the last few tracks – Tommy Iommi’s guitar provides most of the highlights on offer – some of them seemed to be the result of an engineer splicing various tapes together because the song construction was a bit haphazard.
I don't think that Black Sabbath necessarily represent a band I wished I'd discovered years earlier, but they clearly represent an important genesis of one of the strands of music that I love: metal and hard rock. So, thanks to
@GornikDaze for giving me a reason to listen, and I will get to their "Paranoid" album soon.
I've said before that joining in the music discussion on these forums has led me to listen to a lot of classic music that I've missed in the past. Apart from Dylan, The Doors and CCR, I never usually went as far back as the 60s and 70s when getting into a band or genre. However,
@OB1 's Led Zeppelin nomination had me listening to their back catalogue, and I must get around to the other part of the unholy trinity: Deep Purple. Given my love for the Hammond in rock (sadly, not Klaus Wunderlich), plus the fact that I love the few tracks I've heard from Deep Purple, I really should listen to their best albums.
Taking all of this into account, I’m going with
7/10.