Black Sabbath – Ozzy Years Reviews

I will now undergo the task of reviewing every Black Sabbath album ever! That’s somewhere between 20 to 25 albums, if you only count the studio LPs. I dare not touch the gazillion live releases or compilations. These reviews will be smaller than my normal ones obviously, which usually go of on unreadable tangents of quasi-wit comedicness and unjustified criticism.

This post will contain Black Sabbath’s first eight albums, which are the ones featuring Ozzy Osbourne on vocals. Most people refer to this as the classic Sabbath period, which is fair enough, although they released some great stuff without Ozzy and at least a few Ozzy-Sab albums weren’t very good.

1970 – Black Sabbath (self titled debut album)

Often cited as the ‘earliest heavy metal album’, this debut is probably my favourite of the entire vast Sabbath penor. The opening lyric is “what is this that stands before me?”, which perfectly sets the mood. This was the first album to have a really dark, overdriven guitar tone, disturbing lyrics and an overall sense of evilness/dread to the music. Look at that cover…it’s so fitting. I need not go into detail of any particular tracks, I’ll just say the whole album sounds like a mix of heavy blues music, hard rock, a little bit of jazz and a whole lot of marijuana smoke.  5 out of 5

 

 

1970 – Paranoid

Easily the most influential and popular album by Black Sabbath, but I never thought it was the very best. Not to say it’s really lacking or anything, especially with songs like the opening track, War Pigs, which I think may qualify as one of the best songs ever created. Call me crazy, but I just don’t like the song Iron Man, with it’s catchy riff and general…I dunno. I just can’t stand listening to it for some reason. Nonetheless, most of the content on the album is still absolutely masterful despite my ability to bitch about little things. It’s another step in the riff-based and bizarro soundscape known as heavy metal, this time with a more developed and less raw feeling than the self-titled album. The riffs were dark, the lyrics were scary, the popular song Iron Man was annoying. Ah well. Two classic albums in the same year also, for what it’s worth. 4.5 out of 5

1971 – Master of Reality

Going even further into the realm of heavy guitar riffs, philosophical lyrics and whatnot, this is the third classic in a bloody row. The first track is called Sweat Leaf, I’ll give you three tries to guess what it’s about. The next song contemplates religion, which I always thought was a funny juxtaposition, it’s like first some guy smokes a bunch of weed and then starts talking about existentialism. I don’t feel the need to really elaborate on this album too much, anyone who’s anyone knows it’s full of mind-blowing compositions, a dirty guitar tone, and an even bigger weedy feeling than other Sabbath albums. Like Paranoid, I don’t really consider it perfect, but who gives a hoot. 4.5 out of 5

 

 

1972 – Vol 4

I always felt this album was a slight slip in quality. First off, couldn’t they have thought up a better title? “Volume 4″, thats it? Can’t fault it for lying, I guess. Cover’s kinda lame too, but so be it. There’s a few tracks on here that I think are either filler or weirdly contrived, especially the horribly out of place ballad Changes. Snowblind always sounded a little out-of-tune also, although I suspect that may have been intentional. Oh well, says Mike. On the flip side, there’s at least several undefeatable classics thrown in to balance it out, particularily the crushing 8-minute Wheels of Confusion. Sabbath still sounds very inspired on this, and okay, it’s still overall a very good LP. Just it’s a little contrived and I don’t consider it a classic. 4 out of 5

 

1973 – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

This album is basically duking it out with the self-titled one as my favourite Black Sabbath disc. It’s a little more straight-forward than Vol.4, but the whole album feels consistant and lacks any bad tracks, except for the synthy nightmare Who are You?.  The lyrics are really what make it for me, the entire album has an agitated and cynical tone, feeling like a pissed off burnout going on well informed psychological rants. It’s a huge, brooding and innovative album, and it nevers looses what makes metal great while attempting to experiment with the formula. The whole infatuation with witches and magic was gone too, replaced with heartfelt skepticism and a general feeling of confrontation towards naysayers. And oh yeah, the riffs are freakin’ awesome as well. 5 out of 5

 

1975 – Sabotage

Whoa. Even after multiple listenings, I cannot fathom what kind of things were going through the bands mind when they created this album. Probably a whole lot of drugs much worse than pot, but so be it. This is as gritty, dark and contrived as Sabbath would ever get but luckily, it works. I find alot of fans are torn on whether this is the work of desperate artists caught up in their own minds, or if it’s a brilliant statement towards the intrinsic effects of heavy drug use. It is indeed both, as I think this was the point where intoxication level was brimming to the extreme. Symptom of the Universe is so damn heavy that a lot of people consider it the earliest form of thrash metal. When I first listened to it, I didn’t like how weird it was, but upon further listenings I can sort of understand the album. It’s idiosyncratic, to say the least, but lovably so. 4.25 out of 5

 

1976 – Technical Ecstacy

Here’s where things start to get a little…shitty. Before this album, Sabbath always sounded good, even when they were falling on their asses from all the intoxication influence. This entire album is sort of a bloody mess, the music swinging schizophrenically between lazy to contrived to silly. Here’s a song title I don’t like: ‘Rock N’ Roll Doctor’. The drugs were pretty obvious on previous Sabbath albums, but at least those ones dug deep into your mind with lyrics and gritty riffs. The experimentation here sounds pretty half-assed, the drugs have not made the band philosophical, it’s just made them lazy. It’s nowhere near as bad as I just made it out to be, but it’s considered to be the first huge drop in quality for the band. 3 out of 5

 

 

1978 – Never Say Die

The 8th and final Black Sabbath album to feature Ozzy on vocals, and does he exit the room gracefully? Nope, quite the opposite. This is the sound of a rockstar shitting his pants and dying after finding out how mediocre of an album he’s just written. It’s in the same realm of half-assed-ness as Technical Ecstacy, but even further so. I almost pity this poor album, from it’s bad production and lame vocal performance from Ozzy. The band had basically lost it’s inspiration here, in favour of hard drugs and bad lyrics. The album spirals out into an infinity of unlistenable pyschedelic jams, boring lyrical content and a general feeling of musicians block. Okay, okay, it isn’t terrible and Sabbath would release worse albums (see Born Again, my earliest review on this blog) but listening to this is like seeing your favourite childhood racing horse being taken into the glue factory. 2.5 out of 5