![]() ![]() ![]() 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). For all his stylistic innovations and strengths as a composer, Iommi isn't a hugely accomplished soloist. Unfortunately, much of side two is given over to loose blues-rock jamming learned through Cream, which plays squarely into the band's limitations. Even if the album ended here, it would still be essential listening. "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. Thematically, most of heavy metal's great lyrical obsessions are not only here, they're all crammed onto side one. 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. ![]() Take the legendary album-opening title cut. Sabbath's genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. 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. 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. 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. 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. Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. ![]()
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