Black Sabbath
50 years ago today Black Sabbath’s debut album was released in the UK, the album that launched a thousand riffs.
It has earned its status as the ur text for heavy metal music, namechecked by pretty much everyone in the business. And yet it is a record with more variability and nuance than you might expect from the band’s subsequent reputation.
It was recorded over two days after the band had been gigging intensively in the UK and over the North Sea. One of the big music papers of the day (I’ve mislaid the reference) remarked that they’d been taken by surprise because the band had seemingly come from nowhere, which meant no more than that they hadn’t played London where most of the journos were based. It was not, as we would say now, the music of the swinging metropolitan elite.
New Musical Express
Like all good bands, Sabbath was greater than the sum of its parts. Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osborne are freed to do what they do because of the tightness of Ward and Butler’s rhythm section, and Ward and Butler themselves are playing with and around what Iommi and Osborne are doing. There’s a lot of space in the music, even when it sounds at its most dense. Is this because Bill Ward was playing as a jazz drummer? I don’t know, but the record is notably musical for much of its 40 minutes, as opposed to 40 minutes of aural bludgeoning.
Note, by the way, that NME describes them as ‘very much in the progressive bag.’
The LP has its wayward moments: the stereo placement of the instruments can be distracting from time to time, and better things were to come from Iommi. Evil Woman has decidedly pop overtones behind the heavy arrangment. But as a debut album and statement of intent it’s hard to think how they could improve on it. They did though, with Paranoid later in the year.
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