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.

1970@50: BLACK SABBATH

Rain falls. Distant thunder. A church bell. Then Baam Baaam Baaaaaaaam! A tide of solid metal guitar tone blares from a G to the tritone C#. This erases the thunder you were just hearing. It's better than thunder. It's a horror movie scene. Ozzy Osbourne enters with a cry of terror, describing an unearthly scene of death and the devil. The reason this works so well across the decades for all its hokey imagery is that the band is taking its time to let the atmosphere sink in. They are happy to let a chord ring until you get it, happy to linger on a syllable until you know it comes from the pain of fear.  You are there in the clearing in the woods with something unbelievably malevolent around you and there's no escape. Towards the end, when they're confident you're in, does the gallop begin and the song reach for its dynamics. And then, amid the riffing, snakey bends and feedback howls you start thinking of Jeff Beck and then the band finishes on a tight slicing beat that drove Beck's Bolero. Welcome to the world, Heavy Metal.

A note here. Why say this here rather than for Led Zeppelin or any of a handful of other candidates? Zep were two albums in by the release of this one and rang with gigantic riffs and vocals from an iron foundry. However, they were also about expansion and exploration (the name itself refers to something both heavy and light) and were soon to release an album that was about half fully acoustic and folky (the next album had extensive acoustic numbers and the one after that had funky workouts, jazz rock solos and reggae). Deep Purple would continue veering towards a kind of heavy prog. While Sabbath showed they weren't just about the crunch even on this one their sheer commitment to the aesthetic of the gothic. Even a song that starts with a lute is aimed at the dark outside. I have no doubt the band thought of their music simply as rock, perhaps with a theatrical edge but rock all the same. But their remaining career has lived up to the promise of this first statement.

The Wizard starts with the kind of lonely train station blues harp figure that British Invasion bands wore like a badge of entry for the decade just gone. When the band comes in it fuses with the metal chord riff. After a lot of shuffling and bashing the vocal part of the song begins with a melody that wouldn't be out of place in an old Yardbird's cover version of a Howlin' Wolf number. Really? Isn't this against the rules? Well, they are only just being made as we listen. Chief rivals to the throne, Led Zeppelin were doing the same but never seemed bothered by how close they were to their roots. One and a half songs into Sabbath's debut and this already sounds old fashioned.

A very easy two chord groove that borders on jazz starts Behind the Wall of Sleep before a bluesy ascending riff starts the verse and is answered by an equally bluesy vocal that pans around the sound stage. The intensity of sleep states recall the H.P. Lovecraft story paraphrased in the title, including sleep paralysis and its terrors. A rocking instrumental takes us through to morning where all returns to sunlight and ease.

A meandering bass walk with a wah-wah pedal fades up, strolls around, realises it's in the wrong room and leaves again. The iconic modal riff of N.I.B. growls until the band kicks in behind it in full power. Ozzy sings with a stinging wail that though many doubt his love it is genuine and hers must also be real for this deal to work. Oh, his name is Lucifer, please take his hand. the genius of this is to present from within a dark and strident musical armour Satan is powerless without the will of the other. You don't have to believe in any of the pageantry to understand the abusive folie a deux to this. I don't know if they meant anything more than the devil meets the girl at the crossroads or how the flower children were being seduced (the Manson trials were still fresh news) but the force of the song allows much reframing. With instrumental workouts that sound like movie scores and Ozzy in great voice this will always sound ready and new.

Evil Woman struts around, proving that a cover version can be more vital than an original as long as you are willing to drag it into your own workspace and fashion it there. If it's less remarkable than the originals around it it at least doesn't beg you to skip it.

Lute and jews harp open Sleeping Village. Ozzy's vocal is dramatic but the words are pleasant. It's an intriguing juxtaposition. The band comes in after these very few lines and proceeds to a structured jam. This loses me, frankly but I'll have to give them the discipline in this rushed extended session for bringing what would have been a show stopper on stage into something at least listenable.

This moves seamlessly into Warning which is set in a swirl of Hendrix-style psychedelia. The words and vocal melody are all Britrock blues that you would have been hearing in Free, Led Zeppelin etc around you. Tony Iommi's guitar showcasing here verges into the samey territory that all those bands could. The one thing that Zeppelin had throughout their recording career was knowing the line between what they were expected to do on stage and what wouldn't be tolerable on record. Page's solos and instrumental breaks were mostly kept brief. Grand soloing was for live shows. That said, the guitar playing here is very fine. It's just that in context, in a crowd that included Page, Beck, Clapton, Hendrix and Peter Green this sounds more routine than impressive.

But what I'm missing here is that this is a kind of Please Please Me for the other end of the decade. This record was set down in less than one day and the overdubs (vocal doubling and a lot of guitar layering) not that long. The band was playing their stage show. If the recording lays bare how influenced they were by their peers, moments like the eerie guitar moaning in the dark of the end of Warning and all the original riffage and dynamics also show how well the band knew the emotional journey's of their songs and could steer them as musicians in control of their own power.

The cover art might well scream hokey now after generations of metal and goth record sleeves tried to go further but it works still for being understated. A green faced woman in black stands by a pond near an old farm house. It could be now or 1465. The problem lies in the inner gatefold with the band name in a font that looks enough like the kind of Art Deco era branding that was more fashionable on albums where the band shots are in grassy fields at magic hour. It really doesn't look like the band you'd expect. I wondered about this and Googled the font. There is one developed later that bears the band's name. I found a generator and typed in Daisy Maisy Love Bomb Band and it looked like this:

Anyway, the other thing on the inner cover is a wireframe inverted cross filled with a prose poem with imagery taken from the photograph. It's all atmospherics and Year 10 poetics about birds being silent from singing of too much terror. It was written by the photographer's assistant and comes so close to saying nothing with a lot of words that it's almost forgettable but I can't help wondering if it felt so try hard back in 1970.

This is an extraordinary debut from a band whose influence would govern what would come to be known as metal and well beyond that. I'll get to that in more detail when I write up the album that followed, Paranoid, later in the year as there's more to say from that context. But for this moment in rock music I can only dip me lid for a band who crafted their way out of endless blues workouts in pubs and school dances into self-generating folklore.