We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago…..
I’ve said before…I was not a Black Sabbath fan. Oh, I knew some of the songs from Paranoid but never really dug in deep to their catalog.
Some fan reviews of “Vol 4”, their 1972 release, say its the second best Sabbath album. I’ll take their word for it.
It is a somewhat interesting mix of styles. The usual Tony Iommi power chords are here in tunes like “Wheels of Confusion” and “Snowblind” and the latter includes some killer ax solos.
The ‘doom’ stuff is here as well in songs like “Cornucopia” and “Under The Sun”. But they also give us a ballad like “Changes” and an acoustic instrumental like “Laguna Sunrise”, which you would never guess is the same band that gave you War Pigs and Iron Man.
I like the energy of “Supernaut” (it was a fave of Frank Zappa) although Bill Ward had trouble playing his parts on it and thought he was going to be fired. The booze and cocaine might have had something to do with it.
The stories of cocaine use by the band while recording this are legendary. They actually wanted to call the record “Snowblind” but the record company nixed it.
Rolling Stone ranked this as the 14th greatest heavy metal album on their 2017 list. If you say so…..
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