Technical Ecstasy (1976) and Never Say Die! (1978)

I’ve been spending a post per album in this series, but from here on out we’ll be combining multiple albums in one post. This doesn’t mean everything heretofore is superior to or more deserving of comment than everything else, just there’s only so much I have to say about some things. Another way of putting it: just because I gave every song a deep dive doesn’t mean that you have to. 

(1976)

The idea behind the cover is robots having a quickie on an escalator and then moving on, sort of a commentary on 70s Looking for Mr. Goodbar culture. Pretty self-explanatory, I guess. This is as close as need Sabbath to come to exploring sex of any kind. 

As Geezer said later about this and the next record: "Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive then and we felt that our time had come and gone." And you can hear that self-consciousness on both records. But I'm sympathetic. No one forms a band to just play the same songs the same way over and over again or to stop evolving with whatever scene produced them in the first place. I imagine, too, when you're Black Sabbath or Alice Cooper or any onetime-shock-to-the-status-quo/bold-new-direction, those new zeitgeist warriors are felt even more keenly.

My favorite bits of TE happen on side two: “All Moving Parts (Stand Still)” (what a cool groove) and “Rock and Roll Doctor,” which came on random shuffle once really loud and I had no idea it was Sabbath and was like “What the hell is this, this is great.” I recommend this approach with Technical Ecstasy (and Never Say Die! As well)  - pretty much every song sounds better if isolated from the rest of the album. Anyway I'm an easy mark for any such sentiments. The kid in me thinks they're really talking about rock and roll and not cocaine. Either way, though, whatever works.

Broad overtures to “rock and roll” were popular in the 70s, too, of course, and possibly this was the band pitching their efforts in such a direction. (Possibly Kiss?) I hear Greg Lake (“It’s Alright” sung by Bill Ward) later-era-sad-Ozzy (“She’s Gone”), or more prog-type arrangements (“You Won’t Change Me”) in the mix. 

(1978)

Titles with an exclamation point always crack me up. I used to use examples of how adding one changes the effect completely (“imagine if it was Forrest Gump!” was my go-to example) but literally any example will do and they're all perfect. 

The cover is… cool? Dumb? I can’t tell which. In such circumstances I default to cool.

The back cover works for me just fine, either way. Just like the composition.

They continue their experimenting with 70s sounds on this one. The title track is fine, but Ozzy’s vocals aren’t great and there’s really noting to the riff or arrangement, it’s just kind of an unembellished chord progression. “Johnny Blade” and “Shock Wave” and “Air Dance” all bounce between sort of sounding like other contemporary bands, from Kansas to Thin Lizzy, singalong bro-rock (“A Hard Road,” would’ve been perfect for a certain era of Oasis), and “Over to You” starts promising but doesn't really go anywhere.

Standout tracks:

“Junior’s Eyes” This one really gets in your head. Ozzy’s vocals aren’t great; I guess he was kinda out-to-lunch in the mid-to-late 70s. Anyway I get a mental image of a strangled muppet on Ozzy's vocals in some spots. Cool production, though, and perfectly valid track. I like that Sabbath expanded their comfort zone. 

“Breakout” This is just their filler-instrumental/ ambience track, but it’s pretty cool. Definitely would’ve been great mix-tape fodder had I known it existed back in the day.

And probably my favorite, the album closer, sung by Bill Ward, “Swinging the Chain.” At first I kind of loved this one ironically. Bill’s vocals are enthusiastic but strained, the riff and production are kind of a mess, and there’s the whole Fabulous T-Birds swagger of the ending (“You better be-liiieeeve it!”) which is fantastically ill-considered. And I still think all that, but then I just kind of grew to love the song and don’t want them to fix or change anything. 

I appreciate that the Ozzy era comes to a close with everyone in the band but Ozzy singing “You better believe it!”

~

And that’s a wrap on Sabbath mk1. Here’s how the first Ozzy era breaks down for me, pointswise * least to most favorite:

Technical Ecstasy

Never Say Die!

Vol. 4

Master of Reality

Black Sabbath

Sabotage

Sabbath, Bloody, Sabbath

Paranoid

* How the sausage is made: I assign each track a zero to five rating and add ‘em up, average ‘em out.

The above is just song points total. That can sometimes give a misleading score, as some albums just have more songs than others. (Typically this only becomes a problem when comparing albums from the CD era with those before it, as bands had more space to fill.) The above break down the same by average and total, except Sabotage and Black Sabbath are flipped.

My personal favorite, points or no points, will always be Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath.

I’ll take a break from Sabbath for a few posts before jumping back in with their 80s and beyond stuff. Behind the scenes I’ve already completed the big listenthrough, so now it’s the typing-up-and-sorting-out of the notes and bookmarks and revisiting a few things.

These Were the Voyages, pt. 1

I've been lugging these around for years: 

but have never read them. Since I'll be moving sometime - somewhere - in the hopefully not too distant future, I decided the time was right to finally take the plunge. 

I read the first dozen or so issues on my friend Liz's suggestion back in the day. She was shocked that I was into Star Trek and comics but for some reason wasn't reading the comics. Which was kind of weird, I guess, except I took all cues from my older brother, and he never liked the Trek comics (Marvel/ Gold Key.) Liz has come up before in my Trek McReverie; outside my parents, she was the person primarily responsible for my subsequent Trek fandom. 

For years I've had a memory of reading some kind of Saavik origin-story that I'd convinced myself must've been in the novelization of either Star Trek II or III. I do remember a romance between Saavik and David Marcus, for example, that was cut out of TSFS but left in the novelization. But years back when I was doing the original Captain's Log series I re-read both and nope, no origin story. It took until the far future of 2021 to realize what I've been half-remembering all this time is "The Origin of Saavik" arc in these DC Trek comics (issues 7 and 8.) Long-time mystery solved. Ain't worth a thimbleful of Sehlat spit for anyone else, but that's the kind of "mystery solved" I personally live for with these blogging projects.

Anyway, it's time to read these damn things and determine their ongoing presence in the McMolo Archives. I don't know how often these'll come together and apologize in advance for any screencaps-blurriness. These are all 'caps I'll be taking from my phone, sending to myself, and editing in Paint.

Okay let's jump in.

DC's Trek, vol 1, came out after The Wrath of Khan and took off from there. I'm always intrigued by that sort of thing, which goes back to leafing through my brother's Star Wars comics sometime after The Empire Strikes Back came out, when they had a storyline that picked up right where the last frame of that movie ended. It's such a unique angle, sideways-specific to a time and place that no longer matters i.e. whatever you imagine happening after The Empire Strikes Back or The Wrath of Khan has been rendered moot by the appearance of The Return of the Jedi and The Search for Spock. 

It began pre-Crisis and continued post-Crisis, making it one of a handful of DC titles to survive the 80s without getting caught up in any of that. All the odder considering DC's Trek editor was Marv Wolfman, Crisis co-author, whose edict to writer Mike W. Barr (author of the Trek book Gemini and others) think comic books, not television. Comic book pacing, comic book logic, etc. The balance to strike is important. Characters based on actors have to have their likeness approved over and over again which always handicaps the illustrator, I think, but both Tom Sutton (as inked by Ricardo Villagran) and Mike Barr do a good job of wedding the Trek-verse to the logic of the comics page. (Without going full-on Gold Key about it.)

David and Carol Marcus have returned to Regula One, the Enterprise has returned to Earth, and Admiral Kirk has convinced the brass to let him take over the ship permanently. This is all established effectively within the first couple of pages. Saavik is Science Officer, and the regular crew (minus Spock of course) is joined by Ensigns Bryce and Bearclaw (I know), who both had relatives on the Gallant. 

They seemed to be setting up a deeper dynamic, here, than they ever get back to. But we shall see where all of this goes. 

This slap leads to a big officer's brawl reminiscent and a dressing down from the Admiral. I keep waiting for the series to return to it, but so far (I'm in the upper teens, at press time) nada.

The first four issues serve as sequels to both “Errand of Mercy” and “The Savage Curtain.” Klingon ships are appearing out of nowhere and attacking Federation vessels, including the USS Gallant, whose destruction at the hands of Koloth (yes, that Koloth) opens the issue. Koloth (along with Kor, who appears soon after) yearns to redress TOS-era grievances but is prevented from doing so by the Organian Peace Treaty. 

The Klingons have gotten around the treaty by placing their station in a wormhole, which Kirk and Bryce discover in TMP-style good old fashioned personal-space-exploration. 

They destroy the station but are confused: why would this scheme work? Surely beings such as the Organians wouldn't be tricked? 

When they emerge, they discover Admiral Turner (of the Federation) and Kahless IV (emperor of the Klingon Empire) have declared war on one another. Kirk's suspicions of what he's seeing and hearing deepen when he sees a Federation propaganda reel detailing atrocities.

Against regulations, (of course) Kirk sets course for Organia to see what the devil is going on. Upon arrival they discover the planet has been encased in some kind of energy-absorbent black field. The Klingons appear and attack. The Enterprise successfully fends them off and beams over the survivors of their destroyed ship. It's Kor! 

Replete with lobster-head re-design. Oh, I forgot to mention what happened to Koloth.

K'plagh.

Also joining the crew is Komon, the sensitive, anti-war Klingon, whom Bryce takes a shine to. Kor banishes him to stay on the Enterprise for his abnormal aversion to slaughter. It used to be a cliche among anti-Wolfman readers (and there were plenty of them in the comic-nerd circles in which I ran in the late 80s) that he introduced an annoyingly "sensitive" (think Phil Donahue, dropped into the Justice League, or moving next door to Spider-Man, etc.) character in every book he worked on, Terry Long being the pertinent example from New Teen Titans. (Who even marries Donna Troy!) Konom has the feel of such a set-up, but I kind of like the idea of a peacenik Klingon. Anyway: he'll be around for awhile; I forgot to get a screencap (well, "screencap") of him this time. 

The Klingons and Enterprise crew go back and forth until Kor and Kirk can team up, "Day of the Dove" style to fight their common enemy, manipulating their civilizations into apocalyptic war. They penetrate the black field and discover: the Excalbians! Specifically, Yarmek, Kirk's old friend from "The Savage Curtain."

Kirk tries to warn him about the whole bare-knuckled punch against a creature of molten rock.

To no avail.

Unsatisfied with the results of the good vs. evil contest of "TSC" (and apparently distrustful of the results of fellow season-3-testtakers the Vians, who surely published the results of their findings somewhere) the Excalbians decided first to imprison the Organians, then to pit the Federation and Klingon Empire against each other, for a better study. Kirk tricks the normally passive Organians into action by stressing the violence of the Excalbians actions, against themselves and the galaxy itself. The Organians remove their sanctions against Klingon/ Federation war-making, which has the ironic effect of ending the present conflict and lock themselves in extra-dimensional combat with the Excalbians. As they grow to planet-sized stature and then gradually disappear, the Enterprise escapes, and it's Mister Sulu, ahead Warp Factor One. The End.

Not a bad beginning! Mike W. Barr and Marv Wolfman are both first-gen TOS watchers, and it shows. The crew acts as you think they would if the cameras kept rolling after Spock's death. Kirk gets the traditional “you’re pushing too hard” speech from Bones, and Bones at least wonders what it was Spock wanted him to remember at the end of Wrath of Khan. Tom Sutton's art is at times hampered by tracing a face or posture from TWOK stills or elsewhere, but for the most part this feels and flows like a comic book and not screencaps transcribed awkwardly from another medium.

LEFTOVER SCREENCAPS

I don't feel like saying "screencaps" in air quotes everytime I use the term. You know what I mean. 

Not too many this time:

I love this panel.

Did anyone ever have this? I remember the ads but never the figures.

Trekkies of Future Past.

We'll be back with a look at Star Trek #s 5 and 6 at some time in the near-ish future.

Sabotage (1975)

I never had this one back in the day. 

I had the Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath cassette I told you about last time, The Headless Cross, and, eventually, We Sold Our Soul For Rock and Roll, the Ozzy-era compilation. My brother had The Mob Rules and so I heard that one a lot, too. (As I was just discussing in the comments from last time, Sabbath wasn't really a part of the "active" 80s metal discussion - at least the MTV/metal-press part of it.) The only song from Sabotage to make We Sold Our Soul For Rock and Roll was “Am I Going Insane (radio)” * and it wasn't really a favorite, so it never occurred to me to pick it up. 

* I never understand that (radio) bit until looking this album up for this post. It's Cockney-rhyming-slang for "going mental," i.e. "radio rental."

Cut to the 21st century and of course you can listen to anything you want, practically, on YouTube or elsewhere. But I still somehow never really knew this one start-to-finish until 2021, and the effect was like getting a new Sabbath-mk-1 record, something I didn’t think was possible. (Technically, it and the next two albums are all in the same boat in this regard, but neither Technical Ecstasy or Never Say Die are in Sabotage's league. We'll get to those next time, though.) Don’t let the cover fool you: this is one of the band's best.

And hey okay, let's talk about that cover. Holy moley that is dreadful. 

Apparently this was one of those by-the-time-we-found-out-it-was-too-late-to-do-anything-else things. That seems unlikely, though - I mean, they just put out two covers that weren't even covers not too long before, this, couldn't they just put out another fake-cover like Master of Reality? Here's what I think: Tony and Geezer look cool, and Ozzy probably thought he looked cool. (Bill's hopeless; that doubling-effect in the mirror makes him unfortunately look like a twisted Humpty-Dumpty. Why is he wearing his wife's red tights?) 

So they said hey, two out of four (okay Ozzy, sure, three out of four, whatever you say) and shrugged it off. Sorry, Bill. This theory does not seem corroborated by any of the band's recollecting, but makes sense to me. Anyway, it was no one from photographer's to designer's to band member's idea, apparently, just a combination of failures on many parts.

Let's get thing started with yet another blistering side one opener:

Hole in the Sky

If you’re asking questions of metal that this song doesn’t answer, I think you need to go back to… the question store? Sorry, thatone really got away from me. But I mean it: you can expand in directions away from this song, but you really cannot reduce metal beyond this point. It's like boiling out everything but some compound's essence or some irreducable equation I could point to to justify how ass-kickingly awesome this song is or how many times I've cranked it and scared my kids the past two months. Everything from the buzzsaw guitar to the smashing cymbals to the screaming Ozzy seems to be tailor-made for my own metal tastes.

As ever, part of that reason for that is undoubtedly that Black Sabbath played such a formative role in my own metal tastes. But most of the reason is just hey, this song really rocks. 

I don't know what to make of some of the lyrics, though. "And even though I'm sitting waiting for Mars / I don't believe there's any future in cars." Hrrm.

Don’t Start (Too Late)

Just a little ditty/ intro to:

Symptom of the Universe

I picture someone, let's say Frank Sinatra, could just as easily have been my grandfather, hearing this in 1975 and having one of those Fall of Ancient Rome moments, like within these sounds is the sound of your own doom, the banshee come down from the mountain. ("Keep away! Keep away!") 

How would Elvis have reacted? On one level he'd have denounced Sabbath as druggies and probably used that deputy badge Nixon gave him to try and set up a sting of some kind. On another, he probably pantomimed a karate move or two and swallowed a few more uppers. 

Regardless, here's a commonly held Sabbath classic; how many have we heard so far? I've lost count. If you isolate each section, there's really nothing special going on here (and even some annoying enunciation Ozzy brings to some of the lines - nothing to sink the awesomeness, just a few lines where you have to question his asylum-garbled reading of the line. Ozzy gotta Ozzy, whattyagonnado) The riff is cool enough, but it's just open-E-string stuff. Bong Metal 101. Ditto for the bass. The way Bill joins the riff (riding that crash symbol) is cool - and Kyuss must have thought so, too, as they do the same on "Green Machine" - but again, nothing special, really. But combine them all and "YEEEEEEEAAAAAAH!"

And to top it all off, those last couple of sections are cool as hell, too. 

Megalomania

“Why don’t you just get out of my life ?
Why doesn’t everybody leave me alone?”

Ahh, back to nightmare rock. I’m not the biggest fan of that fade-in looped effect on Ozzy’s voice, but once again, OGO. Sort of like YOLO, but the Ozzy version. This song’s pretty epic and would make for some good horror fuel in the right venue.

The Thrill of It All

Oh man! That second riff can cut through timber. Ozzy’s voice, too. Has anyone tried any logging with this song? At the right speed, I bet it would be deadly. I can picture the fifty foot speakers trucked into some stand of timber and the scientists with their clipboards. Fire it up and find the right RPM-speed.

And then the whole other section with the “OH YEAH!” parts and those spaceship keys. Great stuff. As great a side two opener as "Killing Yourself To Live" was on the previous record.

"Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it / cuz I got no reason to lie.

Forget your problems that don't even exist / and I'll show you a way to get high."

Supertzar

Epic, with the choir and all. I love that title.

“Am I Going Insane (Radio)” 

That ending laughter montage is all fun and games until that one laugh – you know the one I mean – starts up and then isolates. That is a disturbing sound right there. It's all the more prominent on the beginning of:

The Writ / Blow on a Jug

Good lord, that laugh. WTF.

For some reason I picture a disco ball going with this one, especially with Ozzy coming in with all that intensity and the sustained chord ringing out. It has that mid-70s ambience to me. Also plenty of Ozzy-fury and a fireworks display of metal bonafides. Great ending to the album. Ozzy's vocals falter a little in the last section, but still a nice send-off. 

"Are you Satan, are you man?
You've changed a lot since it began."

~

Although there are two albums left to go in the Ozzy era, with Sabotage, the high water mark has been reached. Which is not to say there is not more compelling music and Sabbath saga to come; perish the thought.

The album is titled what it is because apparently they woke up to how much money had been siphoned off their earnings to that point and spent their time split in the studio between all the legal wrangling related to this. It's easy to forget that these albums were all platinum sellers. I think Sabbath were all paying taxes in the UK, so they made a lot of other people rich before they saw dime one. (Or shilling one, I should say.) But I don't know the ins and outs, only that, like many successful bands at some point, they took a closer look at their business arrangements and didn't like what they were seeing. You can miss a lot when you're focusing on the coke and tours or "the scene" part of being a rock star and not the bottom line. It's understandable. It's also what rapacious music industry types live for. Be wary, be watchful; always have someone sober in the band.

See you next time.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

Hey, let’s talk Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath!

My brother had a ninety minute cassette with this on one side when we were growing up. He doesn’t remember it – I asked him - which is probably because I more or less appropriated it from 1982 on. He remembered owning the actual album, but that must've been later, or maybe he hid that one from me, lest I appropriate it as well. 

Fun fact: I listened to that tape from West Germany 1983 all the way through Rhode Island 1993 without ever even knowing the song titles. What? How? Pre-internet, man. Said cassette only had "Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath" written on it, no other markings. And you couldn't just bike to the library and look up the song titles for SBS back in those days. Nope. As established previously, you wanted to know anything about Black Sabbath, you had to go find some dirtbag somewhere, probably in a garage filled with smoke with empty huffed-paint cans all around. And how would you know if he was even right?

I mean, I suppose I could have picked up the cassette at the mall or something and looked the titles over. Maybe I did, who knows. I have no memory of doing it if so, nor a memory of a single other friend who owned it. I don't know if I ever even saw the cover until I bought the CD in the early 90s.

So after phoning it in for three albums, Sabbath returns to their cover design A-game. (Designed by Drew Struzan, a man on the cusp of an extraordinary career.) I always thought the front cover represented what was waiting for the man on the back cover (a hypocrite) after he died. But apparently they're meant to be different people, just a good and evil, duality of life sort of thing. Striking: one of the all time greats. 

(Sidenote: it's a good thing my brother and I didn't have this cover, as it would have definitely been confiscated by the parental units. I've spoken elsewhere of talking my parents into letting me keep Judas Priest - my Devil and Daniel Webster moment; peaked early, alas  - but one look at that cover and that would have been that.)

Let's jump in.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

When Ozzy first heard this riff, he screamed "WE'RE BACK!" Tony must have felt relieved as well, as it broke a spell of writer's block. It had to be something being in a band with someone like Tony Iommi. How many monster riffs did this guy come up with? For rock guitarists, pound for pound has anyone else come close? Eddie Van Halen, maybe? Jimmy Page? And the other guys in the band are Geezer, Bill Ward, and Ozzy! Lightning in a bottle.

A five star song if there ever was one. What an ending. The whole damn thing. Everything is perfect. 

A National Acrobat

And speaking of riffs - here's another of my favorite ones. This is such a perfect song two for a record. Do I think that because SBS more or less formed my idea of how albums and album-sides should go? Possibly. It's a chicken-and-egg question I never solve. All I know is when I first heard Nine Inch Nails' Wish EP years later, that fantastic one-two combo of "Wish" into "Last" always reminded me of how perfectly "Spiral Architect" follows "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and I used to tell anyone who'd listen.

These lyrics are so perfect.

"I've lived a thousand times / I've found out what it means to be believed."

I like this comment from that lyrics page: "(The song) describes the thoughts of an unborn child. In the end, the lyrics give some general advice about life itself. As we were all born, we should live our life to the fullest." A generous interpretation? But sensible.

Fluff

I'm not the person to ask about this one. I love it. One of the first things I ever learned to play on guitar. Might be filler for others, I don't know. When Sabbath fans talk about this kind of thing usually they nominate "Laguna Sunrise" as their soft-spoken Sabbath acoustic tune. 

Sabra Cadabra

Just isolate that intro. Cool riff, cool band joining in, then Ozzy's vocal entrance around the fifty second mark - that's rock and roll, my friends. 

That's Rick Wakeman on the keyboards and boogie-woogie keys. He and Yes were recording in the studio next door, and he popped over to say hello. He refused compensation, but they paid him in beer. Hey, that's more than Eddie Van Halen was compensated for his work on "Beat It". 

Ozzy allegedly sings "Lovely lady, make love all night long" during this part. But it sounds more like "Love me, lay-ay-yeaaahaa, maker of all my wrong ." I had my ears to the boombox a lot, growing up, trying to make that one out. 

Killing Yourself To Live

Here's a lot of people's favorite Sabbath song, including Kirk and Lars of some later-metal band. Pretty foolproof track. Ozzy sings his heart out on this album. Anyone who disagrees, try and sing along sometime. 

I'm not a huge fan of Ozzy's vocals. I think a lot of his work with Sabbath could've used another take or two, and his timbre gets whinier and whinier in the 80s and beyond. But listen to his work here and all over this record. There should be no doubt he was a hell of a vocalist. I think people have gotten used to slagging him off. Every singer's voice deteriorates over time. Metal is not an easy genre for tenors - not that any genre probably is, over a long enough period of time. I don't know how Ozzy didn't rend his throat to drug-smithereens by the mid-70s, never mind still being able to sing all of his old tunes throughout the 90s. 

Who Are You

I know that I must have been watching Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings a lot when I first discovered this album, as I have a consistent video in my head of Nazgul flying around on fellbeast whenever I hear this song. Wherever that intersection of metal, the occult, Tolkien, and weird cosmic skies pulsating with the mysteries of the damned meet, I bet it sounds like this.

Like "Fluff," I don't know if this is one that will hit other people quite the same way. I do a pretty mean a cappella version of this one, all the parts, and almost updated the evidence to prove it. But I'll save it for our inevitable road trip to Pelennor Fields. 

Looking For Today

Another Ozzy-kills-it song. That long lead-in to the "When was the last time that you cried? YEAH-EAH-EAH-EAH-YEAAAH!" is so great.  Not to mention that note he leaps to during the chorus and fade-out. 

Spiral Architect

Almost feels like one song too many after the perfect finish of "Looking for Today" but once the riff kicks in and things take off, it all makes sense. The journey from the primordial-riff-sludge of the title track to this is complete. 

I've been singing this one since my earliest memories, yet somehow this 2021 listenthrough really drove home this home:

"Of all the things I value most in life / I see my memories and feel their warmth /
and know that they are good
(And you know that I should; YEAH YOU KNOW THAT I SHOULD!")

Hell yeah to that. Geezer's lyrics in general are great on this record. But hell. Such an underrated bastard.

~

Not only do I love this album – always have, always will – it’s pretty much the one that defines heavy metal as a genre for me: how it should sound, feel, how it should comport itself. When a metal band raises a clamor (usually a minor-chord one) in contempt of its sensibilities, they lose me. (Ditto for Pyromania.) Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath is the reason I don’t like much metal after 1990 and also why I never connected with many other Sabbath albums growing up. That came later. They got the formula exactly right here, as they did on Paranoid, too, sure, but this is a fully mature effort: the band, mk-1, at the height of its powers. The clarity in songwriting and production is even more striking coming after the last albums, where sludgy mud-metal was the goal. Geezer's lyrics - nihilistic perfection on Paranoid and elsewhere - have moments of real hope and inspiration here without coming across as New-Age-y or forced. 

It's an effortless-sounding record. For Ozzy, Geezer, Bill, and Tony, it will never be as good as this again. Though the next one comes pretty close.

Vol. 4 (1972)

(1972)

This album was panned on its release, just as Master of Reality had been, but its popularity with grunge and stoner-metal bands of the 90s and beyond has rehabilitated it some. I never really took to it, though, even with the seven or eight additional spins I gave it as part of this project. To me it just sounds like the circumstances in which it was recorded: i.e. the band producing themselves in some mansion somewhere (a Bel Air one owned by John DuPont; who lends their mansion to Black Sabbath, for six effing months? This was a thing to do for the well-to-do in this period, for Alice Cooper, the Stones, Zeppelin, whomever.) with access to way too many drugs. Geezer estimates they spent about $70k on cocaine alone in the six months they spent recording it. Which sounds like a lot, and it certainly is especially in early-70s money, but over six months? Fleetwood Mac spent this much on coke in six days, probably, in the late 70s. 

I'd be curious on the economics of coke-inflation from 1972 to 1979. Where was that class in college?

Simply put, the album is a mess and so was the band when they were making it. Still plenty of Sabbath to sink your teeth into! This will be a pretty breezy entry. 

Wheel of Confusion

I can admire a good nodding-Sabbath groove, but there's more to life than just nodding off. Sorry, very boring. Ah well. Picks up a bit in the up-tempo section but a very underwhelming beginning to the album.

Tomorrow’s Dream

Slightly better but still nothing to write home about. 

Changes

Many consider this to be one of Sabbath’s best tracks. I don’t dislike it, but it’s always struck me as a bit overdone. Sort of like 80s Ozzy. The mellotron is cool, though, and these post-chorus stretches in particular.

I understand they used this in the new version of The Stand that just aired. I didn’t watch but going from the review here it was to mirror a similar scene between Harold and Frannie from the 90s Stand miniseries that used “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” That’s kind of the best scene in the original miniseries, you ask me, so homage-ing it even with Black Sabbath will bristle me somewhat, but it’s an interesting choice as far as Stand subtext goes. I don’t recall if Harold and Frannie have a scene in either the original novel or the expanded one or what song accompanies it. Anyway, it's interesting that to update the 90s adaptation (which used a popular 80s song) of a book written in the late 70s that they went back to the early 70s. Or maybe not interesting. I can't tell anymore.

FX

How to rate such things. This is just the lads on drugs throwing different things against Tony’s guitar while it’s plugged in to a reverb pedal. I like little moments like this on albums, though, to break things up, and it’s always fun playing around with fx. Especially when you’re loaded.

Supernaut

Here’s the album’s best track. Not perfect but pretty damn cool. Apparently the other bands that Sabbath toured or partied with always told them “Supernaut” was their favorite song. 

While we're here, what exactly is a 'naut? I get the nautical reference and it's probably just that but how did this become something affixed to things? As a kid I never understood how a British naval ship translated to "cybernaut" in that old Avengers episode, or, like -gate from Watergate, I guess, it just became something to add to things? A "supernaut" is what? The lyrics don't help much.

Snowblind

Side two opens up with this one, which veers close to the same riff as “Wheel of Confusion,” so it’s boring twice removed. Couple cool bits here and there. The weird thing is how un-cocaine-like this song is. They wanted to name the album Snowblind to reflect its participants state of mind, but the label nixed it.

Cornucopia

This is a pretty cool riff/slog. I instantly want to play some NES in the basement. “You’re gonna go insane! I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR BRAIN!” screams Ozzy. Who you telling, Ozzy? 

This song is undercooked, though, and it’s too bad, as it probably could’ve came together into something more awesome.

Laguna Sunrise

Nice enough little filler. Kind of reminds me of a dream montage in a 70s movie.

St. Vitus Dance

Trying for something a little off-time here, but not sure it worked. It’s a cool enough riff, kind of – actually, it’s a bit much. (This one should've been named "Snowblind.") It feels like it could’ve gone somewhere different but was forced into the direction recorded here. 

Under the Sun

Not a bad ending. Appropriately doom-metal-y. Kind of encapsulates the album actually, with its intermittent, muddied charms poking up through the muck here and there. Doom metal riff, Ozzy’s vocals kinda iffy in spots, muffled bass line (apparently Geezer was an absolute wreck during the recording of this.) 

~

The band went it alone on this one, productionwise, and maybe they needed a Bob Ezrin or Mutt Lange to whip them into shape. I doubt they'd have listened even had a steady hand been guiding the ship.

One thing that did jump out to me though: this is really a dry run/ dress rehearsal for Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. Similar progressions and mixes here and there, similar melodic ideas, similar song placements, etc. Except Sabbath is the fully-finished, polished, and lacquered version of what they appear to have been going for on this one. 

Vol. 4 is the Bag of Bones to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath's Duma Key, perhaps. Makes sense to me anyway!