1970@50: PARANOID - BLACK SABBATH

A brash, dark minor power chord on the guitar falls to the major below it in the kind of Dorian mode resolution that we like so much from medieval music right up to sea shanties. Here, though, there's a sadness to it, a drag in more than one sense. The bass and drums are keeping it buoyant but the melancholy is intensifying. At the fourth chordal knell an air raid siren fades up and fits the time (perhaps the players were timing themselves to it) and it blends perfectly. But it's just getting sadder.  All this and the song is less than 40 seconds into it. The siren doesn't feel like a goofy effect the way that the Foley effects were used by the Beach Boys. This is not a novelty song. The siren sounds like it's part of the music. Suddenly the guitar changes to a rapid two chord blast and Ozzy Osbourne comes in singing about the War Pigs of the title. His voice is solid, concentrated, and his own, somewhere between Richard the Third as voiced by Olivier and Screaming Lord Sutch. Then again, it's really just Ozzy by now, any derivation has been stripped away by gigging and the pace of living. The generals gather like witches at black masses, the politicians flee to the safety of bunkers and the poor put the uniforms on and walk into the bullets and the bombs. Not subtle enough for you? They're singing about warfare or what war is made of. Subtlety be damned. This is the thing about Black Sabbath at their best (and this album ranks among their very best). The groove toughens into a four on the floor metal groove as the song moves into its third phase. Yet another chord riff leads to a modal solo which rises into rapid double tracked business as the drums keep a solid ground and the aggressively picked bass provides both thump and melody. A sudden return to the first verse form as the picture develops. The third chord riff enters again and gives way to a more arpeggiated form which swoops down the scale before moving into a melodic fulfilment of the opening groove and then another double tracked solo. Finally the arpeggio resumes and speeds up artificially (via pitch control) to a final bash. We have travelled through a monochrome landscape of mass annihilation and, weirdly, it feels good.

The title track which was released as a single begins with a swift riff on the seventh before finding a chugging modal chord riff. Ozzy sings about losing his mind. A harsh beauty of crunching guitar tone, thickened by bass and hardened by drums beneath a syllable spitting caterwaul. It's metal but it's also proto punk without knowing it. It's a creation and performance extraordinary for compressing what would be known as heavy metal into a radio friendly chunk of clinical insanity that musically presaged UK punk by over half a decade and just kept punching.

Planet Caravan then surprises us with its gentle clean guitar arpeggios, conga drums and finger bass. Ozzy sings through a flanger about travelling through the cosmos in yet another medieval scale. The feel is a soft but intense jazz like the jamming of a psychedelic outfit but in context gathers some black light poster gravity. A a subdued but lyrical solo demonstrates to anyone listening that this band is not limited to headbanging. A jazz piano adds some harmonic ground. The thing with this track is that it doesn't sound out of place for as much as a bar. Anyone who wrote Sabbath off as Neanderthal Rock wasn't allowed to after this one.

Then again. A punching kick drum. The guitar comes in with a withering power chord bending downwards. An entire chord on a Gibson SG without a whammy bar. Dedication! Ozzy enters with his voice extremely modulated to sound robotic which is still scary: I AM IRON MAN! And then one of the greatest riffs in all rock music grinds out rising through a modal minor to an overdriven rapid alternation of chords (this Tony Iommi doesn't just have chops he's inventing them for generations). The vocal follows the riff exactly, in Osbourne's most compelling wail. The bass, too, is going along. The result is power. Pure bloody power. A strange figure is described by passers by who wonder about the metal man who has suddenly appeared in their midst. There's a problem. He's become this iron monster from time travel gone horribly wrong. He returned to warn the earth of the apocalypse but his appearance is so weird that he is shunned and then spurned. His cataclysmic revenge becomes the Armageddon he saw.  A development section shows that the band were not stingy on the riffs and they kick into a workout before hitting base with a reiteration of the verse riff. The finale, depicting in pure riffage is an aural picture of the apocalypse which blends surf rock galloping on the bass, loose but restless cymbals, feverish soloing rising to a final da-da-da! ending.

Electric Funeral grinds up with a thick riff voiced with a wah-wah pedal pressed more slowly than usual which gives it an otherworldly sound as the pattern rises and falls through a chromatic sequence. Ozzy comes in with the others as the verse melody tightens the chromatic phrase to give the words a sense of chanted description. A nuclear apocalypse flashes the earth to waste. The gear changes to hi-speed  and Ozzy's is in a higher scream with more accounts of the devastation. And the sole off moment in the song happens as someone else snarls "Electric Funeral" four times. This almost ruins the whole song. Ozzy's lyrics are already on the edge of overstatment and then this guy comes on stage in a skeleton costume and starts telling you why it's scary. It's the metal equivalent to the ba-ba-baaahs at the end of the instrumental section in God Only Knows. In both cases they were doing so well. The opening riff grinds back after a breath. The final verse describes a strange version of the end of Revelation where a mechanical god rules over the wasted earth as the damned fall to cramped cells in the inferno. Fade.

Hand of Doom creeps up slowly with a cinematic bass figure, joined by drums. Ozzy comes in before the guitar, addressing someone who is facing his own death. The guitar slams in, in unison with the bass and Ozzy climbs an octave. Back to the quieter mode. A list of wartime weapons offered as solutions but now the thought of them causes despair and everything shrivels down to opiates. Push the needle in. Guitar slams back in. But it isn't much more than any entertainment. A brief return to the quiet opening before the band kicks in with a high energy riff. Ozzy comes in in high voice, chastising the subject for the self anihilation. Acid is added to the mix and brings colours and other reality-masking distractions. He's burning at both ends. A double tracked solo joins him on his haze before climaxing. The ominous bass riff re-enters. Ozzy describes a living corpse, exhausted by narcosis and suicidal leisure. "Now you're gonna die." The quiet bass figure slowly takes us back into the dark.

This song is why Black Sabbath continued to find greatness beyond their initial success. There is a real poetry to the splicing of military culture, progressive industrialisation and the resort to drugs to shut both out. Osbourne's inspiration had come from accounts of U.S. soldiers traumatised by service in the Vietnam war who picked up opiate and lysergic lifestyles which became whole lives on their return. The musical dynamics of this track, the shadow heavy room of its quiet and deliberate description to the searing rage of its breakout verses, give us the same disciplined power that drove The Stones' Midnight Rambler or The Doors' When the Music's Over. Here, though, it just feels more real.

Rat Salad is an instrumental that sounds like a rejected instrumental section from another track. Either that or a jam turned into a showcase for the guitar and drums as both get extensive solos. It's not quite formless but has little to say and spends minutes of side filling time saying it.

Fairies Wear Boots begins with a palm-muted figure which gives way to another modal guitar riff which gives way to some high soloing and chord riffage before settling into a metal groove. Ozzy tells a tale of seeing a fairy dancing with a dwarf. Oh, the fairy was wearing boots. He takes his story to a doctor who tells him to lay off the drugs. This is a veiled account of Ozzy getting beaten up by skin heads who took opportunity to lay into a hippy. The song acquits itself as a pedestrian rocker but,despite a solid performance and iron-throated vocal, it feels like the last track on an album which it indeed is. The soloing drives off into the night of the fade.

The modal guitar figures can be heard at the other end of the decade in Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album. The force of vocal against hard guitar rock contributed to all of Henry Rollins' career. The dynamics in Hand of Doom can be heard in the study notes of Jane's Addiction's marvellous Three Days. All of the Northwest American bands of the '90s cut the lineage points between themselves and Black Sabbath, leaving no ambiguity about influences, whether they were lyrical or musical. Black Sabbath's descendants are among the peaks of the rock music in the decades that followed their early releases and Paranoid, even more than the eponymous debut, gave that world a field manual on music as a channel of fury against the nodders and the toed-lines that always seem to reform after every upset. That's why we, punks who smirked at them, needed Black Sabbath.