I'm not going to lie - as much as I am a product of the ethos and community aspects of the punk/hardcore scene, I motherfucking love me some metal.
For real.
When talking about metal, it is important to know the source, right? Like, Conan knew Thulsa Doom had stolen his father's sword - hence, why he was determined to destroy Doom, and reclaim the sword that Crom had helped his father forge. Conan WAS metal.
This is why my initial post about metal shall be about Black Sabbath, arguably THE SOURCE for all kinds of different types of metal. Gods of The Almighty Riff, you can trace almost every memorable "heavy" riff of metal right back to them, if you've paid enough attention.
I remember the first time I heard them - my father had an old worn-out 8 Track tape of Paranoid, and I accidentally slapped it into my little portable player I had, thinking it was my Beach Boys' tape. I think the first song I ever heard was "Hand Of Doom" - which is still probably one of my favorite songs of all fucking time. Such an eerie intro, all slow and spooky, with Geezer Butler's loping and teetering-on-the-verge-of-madness bass line, coupled with Bill Ward's clicky little drum thing he did so well. Imagine being all of 10 years old, sitting in the garage and hearing every ounce of what your future sounds like when the rest of the song comes crashing in around you - Tony Iommi's monolith of a riff, and Ozzy Osbourne screeching his incantation about the evils of heroin abuse...which I knew fuck all about at the time - I just thought to myself "ohmygodthisisnotthebeachboyssssssss!!!"
I've been a fan ever since.
Instant Karma:
BLACK SABBATH - HAND OF DOOM (LIVE 1970)
ANYWAYS...
When trying to decide on the Black Sabbath album to expound upon, it took me nary a nanosecond. I am very fond of every Black Sabbath album during the Ozzy Era - the band was just fucking monstrous and the tension within their ranks comes out beautifully in the recorded output. But one record stands the fuck on out for me -
Sabotage (released in 1975) is a fucking masterpiece.
The album kicks off with the loping and spacey drone of "Hole In The Sky" - a song with some of the most biting and gorgeously doubled Iommi guitars on it, so much so that you can hear the strings being ground into the frets by his plastic-covered fingertips(Iommi lost two fingertips in an industrial accident at the age of 17). Ozzy sounds like he's ready to rumble, kicking out lyrics with an acerbic twist like this couplet- "I'm living in a room without any view, I'm living free because the rent's never due," setting us all up for the record's overall theme - the group's terrible struggle with the pressures of their own fame and the deterioration of their musical union.
Then this glorious album does a quick shift into a pretty little Iommi Spanish-styled guitar-type thing, "Don't Start(Too Late)," for all of forty-nine seconds before the roaring multi-tracked guitars of "Symptom Of the Universe" come blasting out, probably birthing the chugging madness of thrash/speed metal in its wake (we can argue that one until I die - for me this riff is Patient Zero for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal, Speed Metal, Power Metal, Stoner Metal, and whatever else fucking type of metal you want to conjure up to talk about). The song just fucking pushes air, a tornado of calliope riffs, pounding drums and Ozzy, whipping up a frenzy until yet another beautiful little half-time acoustic interlude comes easing into the middle of the maelstrom. And as soon as you find yourself nodding your head along with this tiny oasis within a sandstorm, Ozzy starts sweetly begging you to "find happiness together, in the summer skies of love" - Goddamn these motherfuckers were at the top of their game.
Up next, is the slow-burning madness of "Megalomania" - a song that lyrically indicts the entire fiasco of fame. The song starts off all dark and moody, and by the time Ozzy spits out "I sold my soul to be the human obscene," it's pretty evident that he's over all of us, and he just wants everyone to back the fuck off and let him be a freak on his own terms. As soon as the song shifts, Iommi's guitar pulls an auditory shapeshift and starts to sound like a fucking hissing snake - riffs swirling and building to a crescendo as Ozzy continues to beg for his solitude and sanity, singing lines like - "Why doesn't everybody leave me alone now?"
"The Thrill Of It All" comes rolling on in afterward, opening with a chiming and madly-distorted Iommi intro before it's main rhythm kicks in - a chugging piece of metal with plenty of room to breathe between Bill Ward's kick drum. Almost bordering on being a rap-metal song (1975, bitches!), Ozzy starts singing about feeling like Jesus himself needs to come correct and call off his dogs (Black Sabbath was a band that was obviously hounded by religious nutcases, which, when coupled with maniacal fans - you'd write songs like this too, my friends). Hell, he even calls The Man out himself with "So come alive, you know you're magic to me." Yet another in a canon of songs following the band's theme of wanting to know why, as English lads forging everlasting metal, they still had to suffer from Catholic Guilt.
Tying things back to Conan The Cummerian, the instrumental "Supertzar," can easily be synched up to any scene in Conan The Barbarian in which Conan is either crushing his enemies, seeing them driven before him, or hearing the lamentation of their women. This is a great song to roll another joint to while grooving, or even a nice slow jam to make sweet love to. Trust me, as I have been digging this album for many moons now, and I know what I am talking about.
"Am I Going Insane? (Radio)" (The title of which caused some confusion due to the "(Radio)" part, which lead people to believe the song was a radio cut or radio version. However this is the only version of the song. It should be noted that the term 'radio-rental' is rhyming slang for 'mental' - lifted right off Wikipedia, suckers) starts off with a little bit of a synthesizer riff, and then goes on galloping off into the loony sunset of Ozzy's simmering sanity (or lack thereof). There are buried guitars in the mix, snaky little leads that are almost mocking the cadence and timbre of Ozzy's crying out ("If I don't sound very cheerful, I think that I'm a schizo brain"). When the song starts to peter out near the end, crazed laughter starts to come to the front of the mix, reiterating the fact that Ozzy has indeed lost what was left of his mind.
That crazed laughter leads us right into the album's closing track, the scathing and angry "The Writ," a song that I sometimes hear in my head when trying to navigate my way through The Great Unwashed Masses here in The City on any given day. As the laughter fades, we get a brief little bass line from Geezer before we get our faces melted off when the rest of the band kicks in. You can taste the disdain in the riff; another snaking and distorted beast that feeds back and hisses during the rests. Iommi must have had a ball in the studio cutting this record (Ozzy reportedly tried to quit during the recording of Sabotage, citing Iommi's dicking around in the studio as a waste of time that drove him insane), because there are guitars all over the place on this song, doubled and tripled in places where you would never think to do such a thing - AND IT WORKS. And again - the band pulls yet another sneaky little interlude out of their hat, with this one sounding as innocent as some lost piece of soundtrack to some weird 1940s film with a girl singing about how she's lost her way in the world, only to kick back in with the heavy riffing and a rideout that beats any other rideout on any album, ever.
So there you have it. My favorite Black Sabbath album, blow by blow. I'll cop to the fact that in my youth I smoked a fuck-ton of reefer and listened to Sabotage - not that there's anything wrong with that. This album certainly played a huge part in my understanding of music in general, and if you've read this far - you might as well go out and pick the fucker up.
You might even like it.
STIMULI:
HOLE IN THE SKY - LIVE 1975
SYMPTOM OF THE UNIVERSE - LIVE 1978
MEGALOMANIA - LIVE 1975
No comments:
Post a Comment