Year: 18 September 1970 (CD Dec 1986)
Label: Castle Communications PLC (France), NELCD 6003
Style: Hard Rock
Country: Birmingham, England
Time: 60:40
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 378 MbCharts:
UK #1, AUS #4, CAN #20, FIN #4, GER #2, NL #1, NOR #5, SWE #6, SWI #48,
US #12. AUS & GER: Gold; CAN & UK: Platinum; US: 4x Platinum.
From
a moonlit thicket, a soldier wielding a scimitar and a pointy shield
approaches, his eyes bulging with terror beneath a bright white helmet.
He wears pink leggings and an outlandish orange blazer, an outfit that
becomes, in Marcus Keef’s clumsy long-exposure photograph, a garish
streak of glowing neon across the midnight scene. These were meant to be
“War Pigs,” autocratic henchmen Black Sabbath lampooned during their
second album’s bellicose opener and its intended title. From a distance,
they look like an errant splotch of paint across a sheet of
construction paper; up close, they just look absurd.
Still, in all
its grainy ignominy, Paranoid’s cover is one of the most transformative
moments in the early history of Black Sabbath and, by extension, heavy
metal. In 1970, Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut did something few were
expecting—it sold very well, charting both at their home in the UK and
in the United States. Their label, Vertigo, soon dispatched Black
Sabbath back to the studio to record a follow-up, stretching their
already-indulgent impulses into eight-minute songs about war and heroin
and the glory of the guitar. When they needed one more tune, the band
headed to the bar while guitarist Tony Iommi stayed behind and spent a
few minutes writing a simple riff that chugged, paused, and kept
prowling, like a predator always in search of its next meal. They
recorded the song in a flash and called it “Paranoid,” the fulfillment
of a legal obligation.
Vertigo didn’t hear filler; it heard a hit, a
trouncing three-minute assault by a young band that still favored
excessive jams. Six months after releasing Black Sabbath, they issued
the song as Black Sabbath’s second single and demanded that the album’s
title be changed from War Pigs to Paranoid. They wanted to remind
potential customers of the song they’d seen four long-haired weirdos
headbang to on “Top of the Pops” while avoiding the nasty business of
saying something controversial in an era already fraught with civil
unrest. But in the sprint to get the record into stores, Vertigo never
bothered to commission an image that fit the new name. The soldier
simply stands there, an embarrassment in neon. After nearly 50 years,
bassist and songwriter Geezer Butler (and most everyone else) still
hates it: “The cover was bad enough when the album was going to be War
Pigs, but when it was Paranoid it didn’t even make sense.”
The label
was right about “Paranoid,” at least. Propelled by its lead single,
Paranoid was the only Black Sabbath album to top the British charts for
the next four decades. In the U.S., where it nearly broke into the Top
10 mere months after the band’s small stateside debut, it has gone
platinum four times. Record labels realized that heaviness and
spookiness could sell and that Led Zeppelin, Sabbath’s favorite band,
were just the beginning. In ceding to Vertigo’s commercial instincts
about “Paranoid,” both as a single and album title, Black Sabbath helped
launch heavy metal not just as a genre but also as a veritable
industry.
(full version: classicrockreview.wordpress.com/?s=Black+Sabbath+%281970%29)
Album recorded and mixed in the analog domain - AAD. That is, a minimum of digital processing.
A=Analog.
D=digital. The first letter stands for how the music was recorded. The
second letter for how it was mixed. The third letter stands for the
format (all CD's will have D as the last letter).
01. War Pigs (07:56)
02. Paranoid (02:49)
03. Planet Caravan (04:25)
04. Iron Man (05:55)
05. Electric Funeral (04:49)
06. Hand Of Doom (07:07)
07. Rat Salad (02:30)
08. Fairies Wear Boots (06:14)
09. Wicked World (Live. bonus track) (18:51)
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