Happy Halloween!
As with all the spooky albums I’ve covered this week, Black Sabbath’s debut is a brutally haunting affair as it takes no liberties in using it’s sound to give you a terrifyingly unique experience. However, Black Sabbath’s sound does not completely rely on cheap attempts to frighten the listener. From front to back, each and every song on this album holds a gloomy and uncompromising quality which perfectly displays a genre of music at its boiling point, immediately before it would go on to influence rock music for the next 50 years.
The eponymous opening track instantaneously hits you with a statement of Black Sabbath’s atmosphere. After opening with the sound of rain and a bell chime, you’re given three notes, of which come together to create one of the most unsettling riffs you’ll ever pay witness to. It moans and wails of impending doom, making careful use of subduing the riff during the verses in order to emphasise its intensity when it kicks back in. Vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, with his barebones singing ability at the time, comes in to gloom his voice over the track, with his dreary and hopeless style only further adding to the song’s dark mystique. To add further to the uncanniness, there is no chorus to be heard in the track, making it not only an incredibly unique display of 70s rock, but one in which it’s norms are shifted in order to give you an unsettling experience.
Accompanying the title track’s tritone riff are a plethora of memorable songs and classics amongst Sabbath’s discography; the harmonica-inflected stoner rock of “The Wizard”, the instantaneously catchy power chord riff of “N.I.B.” and the unsettling atmosphere of “Sleeping Village”. All of these tracks would become staples of Black Sabbath’s sound and helped define them as one of the key bands in classic rock.
However I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of metal nerds worship this album to no ends, and so I’ll go where no man has gone before and actually give it some criticism. With the album being a product of 70s rock music, most of the songs are built off blues chords and scales. Whilst this is one of the key components in the album’s gloomy sound, it can make it a somewhat tiresome experience in an age when blues music has been returned to and forgotten about multiple times over the past 50 years. For example the track “Warning”, whilst an incredible track in its own right, contains a lengthy guitar jam section which makes the number just over 10 minutes long. Whilst these are not glaring issues with the album, it’s easy to see how modern audiences could be turned off due to many aspects that were derivative of the time the album was released.
In retrospect however, Black Sabbath’s debut is the Godfather of all gloomy British music. It signified the death of the flower power generation, and the introduction of a generation that was marred by the horrors of the Vietnam war and the fear of Satanic panic. Along with Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, released the same year, it would not only go on to create the genre we know as heavy metal, but also influence numerous musicians for decades, even those from outside the rock genre. Black Sabbath is a behemoth in classic rock music, and for that reason you should give these tracks a spin this Halloween:
BLACK SABBATH
THE WIZARD
N.I.B.
WICKED WORLD
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