MASTER OF REALITY

The third album "Master of Reality" was a huge commercial success for the band upon its release in the summer of 1971. An older co-worker was telling me how he and his brother played this thing constantly that year and in doing so annoyed the hell out of a mutual friend who hated the album. So of course when the friend's birthday came around my co-worker and his brother gave the friend what else for his birthday? Master of Reality! He was not amused.

Sadly the message in the album's opener hasn't changed in nearly 40 years. People still "don't know what you're about" and even worse have taken to extremist measures to stifle dissent. There are still too many people who can't make the obvious distinction between an apple and an orange, and the generalizations just snowball from there. It's sad because the damage done fighting the straw man is far worse than the "problem" itself. Imagine what good we could do with the resources wasted on this black hole. Next, the fire and brimstone lyrics of "After Forever" ruin an otherwise great song for me personally and may have helped promote the unfortunate merging of evangelical proselytizing with rock music. But it should have put any nonsense about Sabbath's "occult" motives to rest. It is ironic that a band with such pro-Christian belief chose to perpetuate the image of something sinister and evil, perhaps they just had a good laugh at the thought of pissing off the parents of their customers. I know they succeeded in our household where the band name alone was enough to irritate my dear Mom. But I just love Geezer's joyful up-running bass line throughout this track, wonderful stuff-enough to help me put up with the lyrics. In an interview Butler had this to say to those who view Black Sabbath's motives in a negative light: "any lyrics that I or Ozzy wrote were actually warnings against Satanism, telling people that if you are going to dabble in that, just be careful... I had a very strict Catholic upbringing, so I read a lot about Satan. But we never, ever promoted Satanism or black magic, we only used it as a reference, and it wasn't our only topic. We wrote a lot of science fiction lyrics, anti-Vietnam war songs, the occult was only dealt with in three or four songs. But people completely misinterpreted them, the way they always do... Sabbath even did a blatantly pro-God, Christian hymn type of song, 'After Forever', and people still took it the wrong way. They thought we were taking the piss out of it! I think it's sad that those bands in Norway are trying to get publicity by burning down churches. Music shouldn't ever preach hatred or intolerance, there's already enough of that in the world... Some of these new bands are so fake it's unbelievable, they don't even know what they're singing about half the time." [Geezer Butler]

"Embryo" and "Orchid" are short instrumental interludes that are just beautiful and sadly short. Too bad they couldn't have expanded those a bit. "Solitude" is a mysterious and intriguing acoustic departure that sees them trying a very mellow vocal and woodwind sound without drums. It is nice but ultimately fails to take the great idea to the next level as Zeppelin did with something like "Battle of Evermore." It just fades away too soon. The other tracks are decent hard rock songs but fail to connect at quite the level of the best songs on the previous album. Master is certainly one that fans of the Oz period are going to require but personally it's about 2 ¾ stars.