Paranoid (Black Sabbath, 1970)

If you know Black Sabbath, then this album needs no introduction. Even though I tend to side with the "Ozzy is a clown" faction of the fanbase, it is nearly impossible to deny that Paranoid is a landmark moment in the early history of heavy metal. True it wasn't their first album. Also true was that they didn't invent the genre out of thin air. One can cite at least three bands that were already building the foundations (Blue Cheer, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, etc. and so forth) at the time this album hit the shelves in 1970. In fact, Black Sabbath, to paraphrase a lame quote from Ozzy Osbourne during the recording the album 13, was playing some seriously dark blues.

Pretty much every song on the first side is legendary, but the second side is where things get especially grim, especially with the songs "Electric Funeral" and "Hand of Doom". Yet throughout the album if you cut through the slowed-down riffs and distortion, the blues are right there in front of you. The first album is pretty much the same, but with a freer-flowing song structure and a lower-register Ozzy. However, this was really the last album where the doomy sound is strongly embraced without it sounding like a parody of itself. As I mentioned elsewhere, the band spent far more of their history trying to escape the "Black Sabbath" sound than promote it. You can already here that distancing as early as 1971's Master of Reality. After that, through Sabotage there's still plenty of gloom and doom, but Tony Iommi drives the music more through the riffs than the solos.

I'm not sure why I have the remastered version of the album with no bonus tracks, since I generally only went after the ones that either had bonus tracks I needed, or didn't already have. Maybe I wanted the pretty liner notes. Or, more likely, I wanted a cleaner copy of the album. My original CD was riddled with problems, mostly notoriously a prominent dropout in "War Pigs" that forced me to reach for the volume knob every time.