Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Back on Black Sabbath's first album, a historic disc that marks the creation of metal as a full -fledged musical genre.

A few years after the guitarists have started to increase the amps for the first time to reach volumes to explode the eardrums and the singers began to moan about Valhalla, the Heavy Metal as we know it today was ratified in 1970 on the first album of Black Sabbath. The band, which started as a group of blues in 1968, drew its inspiration from horror films Giallo (like Black Sabbath Released in 1963 and in which Boris Karloff plays) and said he could offer the same exciting and terrifying experience through rock & roll, which led him to write “Black Sabbath”.

The song, inspired by a terrifying experience that Bassist Geezer Butler had (“I woke up and there was this black thing at the foot of the bed that stared at me,” he said), contains some of the most threatening lyrics of Ozzy Osbourne (“What is this that before me? , which uses an agreement formerly avoided by composers and known as Diabolus in Musica (“The Devil in Music”). The effects of rain, thunderstorm and bell sounds are just the dark cherry on the cake.

A few titles later, on “Nib”, Osbourne, whose Sentor's voice with this distant modulation has a hard stamp, strong enough to surpass the guitar of Iommi, sings about a pact with the devil on a heavy riff who predicted “cocaine” by Eric Clapton. The group demonstrates its blues technique on “The Wizard”, on the morbid “Behind the wall of sleep” (“Sleeping Wall of Remorse/Turns Your Body to A Corpse”) and in particular on “Warning”, which contains a long solo Craft interpreted by Iommi.

On the most jazzy “Wicked World”, present on the American publishing, Osbourne sings about politicians who send people to war and others who die of illness, subjects who have since become a cliché of rock but Who, at the time, represented a vision of the world of a franchise to be cold in the back. “We passed these auditions for record companies and they were leaving after the third song, recalls Butler about the days preceding the release of the album. I will always remember that a producer told us to leave, learn to play and learn to write decent songs.

We were rejected again and again, record company after record company ”. But once the album in the bins, Black Sabbath has started a movement.

Find this column on Black Sabbath And many others in our special metal special issue, available via our online store.

Here is the tracklist: