BLACK SABBATH

Black Sabbath's debut is influential, no doubt; pretty much every metal artist around today will cite the title track as an inspiration. Unfortunately, I think that the album doesn't have a ton going for it beyond that characteristic, its influence.

Black Sabbath is hailed as being the first distinctly metal album but personally I believe that, the first track aside, it fits more in the camp of dime-a-dozen dark, heavy blues bands that were popping up around the start of the 1970's. Songs like "The Wizard" and the first side's medley are really just heavy blues songs and Tony Iommi's solos are typical blues rock fare. The album's redeeming feature, in my opinion, are the songs on side two. "Wicked World" is slightly more progressive than the rest of the album, while still keeping in the heavy spirit, and the second side's medley features some of the best work by all the band's members.

"Black Sabbath" laid out a blueprint for the band, and countless others, to follow but there's a lot of fine-tuning (and Tony Iommi de-tuning) that would have to happen before their magnum opus "Paranoid" could be achieved.