Black Sabbath Paranoid (Vinyl)

Black Sabbath's 2nd Release within a year: PARANOID.
Unliked and misunderstood by critics at the time ultimately became their most popular record loaded with Heavy Metal classics. Iommi, Butler, Ward, and Osbourne expanded and focused the style of their self-titled debut and wrote great all-time champion songs...songs that will still be known in a hundred years.

Opening with an Air-raid siren and heavy mid-tempo tandem Bass & Guitar riff of "War Pigs", a bleak anti-war protest, that while maybe the lyrics are a little amateurish (ie: rhyming "Masses" with "Masses") it gets its brutal point across...just like War itself. The titular 2nd track is one of the most recognisable riffs in all of Rock music: 2 minutes 50 seconds of fury! But ultimately it's the song "Iron Man" that is best known from this album and the entire Sabbath cannon... crushing monolithic guitar riffs and horror
movie lyrics combine to create one of the milestones of Heavy Metal and a song that nearly 30 years later earned them a Grammy.

But it's in the lesser known tunes that this album really shines...The stony,
mellow "Planet Caravan", the multi-section anti drug "Hand of Doom",
"Electric Funeral" with its Jazz inspired solo, "Fairies Wear Boot's" with its acid-trip lyrics and menacing swing like it's played by a Jazz band from Hell, and the almost Prog-Rock of "Rat Salad" all together with the hits add up to a must have disc for fans of both Metal and Classic Rock and the record that defined Heavy Metal.
-Kevin Baird

Black Sabbath's 1970 debut album "Black Sabbath" is one of the earliest examples of what would later be coined "Heavy Metal". With Tony Iommi's sludgy down-tuned guitars, and Ozzy Osbourne's slightly flat lonesome wail they broke new ground!
Apocalyptic lyrical themes and minor-key riff's paired with a sometimes slow-motion,sometimes frenetic rythym section to create the blueprint for thousands of future bands.
A stone-cold classic record with songs still well known by metal fans
many decades later, like NIB, The Wizard,the HP Lovecraft inspired Behind the Wall of Sleep, and the title track masterpiece Black Sabbath. A track
that is unlike any that came before it, as it starts with pouring rain,distant
thunder and a tri-tone guitar riff (once banned by the Catholic church as "the Devil's Tone" hundreds of years ago.) then comes Ozzy's frightened and frightening story of a man doomed to hell, a galloping tempo change
a shreiking plea for God's mercy,an iconic guitar solo...and Metal is Born!
Oh,No...Please God Help Me... Indeed!