PARANOID

Quite simply, this album is a flat out milestone. I'm not sure it's ever been surpassed even in a Heavy Rock/Heavy Metal field eventually rampant with legions of participants. There are moments on this album where I actually feel like this band is simply teaching you. About the world. About the possibilities of rock music. About dynamics, restraint, raw power and explosive interplay.

One of the biggest mistakes I've sometimes encountered amongst "prog" fans is to think that if they know the chords or scales involved in a piece of music that it is then fully comprehended and understood. This album disproves such a notion in every way imaginable. It is harmonic minimalism juxtaposed with dynamics and such dexterity that there are moments when I can't even believe anybody pulled this off. It's not just the riffs or chord selections, but how they are stacked, how they are developed and how they are worked out in terms of dynamics. And whatever you think you know about Sabbath, to understand them is to first understand that they basically took ideas from Classical music not in terms of scales and lifted sections, but in terms of dynamics. And not just dynamics in terms of loud section, soft section, but dynamics in the way the band interact. In the way they develop ideas into one epic moment after another.

To play this loud and aggressive is risky. Your sound is out there in such a way that anything you put forward is heard. There is no way to bury mistakes in a mix like this. And this is a band just pummeling most of their peers into the ground. And perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given much of the reaction in the press of the time, the level of sophistication at play here is extraordinary in terms of its ability to put an intensity into rock music which had previously not been fully explored; except by Sabbath themselves on parts of their debut.

There are times when this album sounds like the band simply don't fear train wrecks, and to play on the edge of that potential and never fall off is utterly extraordinary. Listen to "Hand Of Doom" as an example of band which is simply peerless in terms of what they are able to lock into and nail. Stop on a dime, shift tempo, groove, stop, now gallop, now boogie, now rock ... this is stuff which isn't to be believed. The drumming, the bass playing, the guitar work, the singing ... MY WORD!

Which brings me to another point: While Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne deservedly have had praise heaped upon them for their performances here, I feel that Geezer Butler and Bill Ward deserve equal praise. Their contributions cannot be overstated. How they come out of certain ideas and launch into the next with such fluidity is astonishing. And it is really a bit of a lost art. "Fairies Wear Boots" is like a class in this respect. And one where no matter how much power is at hand, an understanding of jazz and blues are also important in terms of hearing all that is at play. These guys knew their stuff, and they brought a lot to the table for an album that is somewhat pigeonholed as being "Heavy Metal" or "loud" or whatever else. Even the album's ballad is unlike any previous attempt at such by anybody. "Planet Caravan" sounds familiar yet out of nowhere. It can't really be traced to the folk music of the late 60s. It's a sort of "space-jazz-folk" sound. Cosmic, even. Beautiful stuff.

Probably no album better defined the possibilities of a genre in rock music than this record. Sadly, I think many bands picked up on the "heavy" side of things, the screaming solos or lyrics of a world going mad. But the feel, dynamics and unique musical vocabulary really represent a sound which only Sabbath would go on to explore in such detail.

Previously rated in 2008. This review written 03-17-2015.