The song refers to a hallucination while high, as well as perhaps a connection to the supernatural world that others couldn’t see. The record closes with Fairies Wear Boots, which fortunately rocks harder than it sounds. Rat Salad isn’t a song so much as a pretense for a drum solo, but Ward doesn’t disappoint. I’m torn between calling it ambitious and lazy. Hand of Doom feels unfinished and fuses parts of different songs together. Electric Funeral returns to their blues-rock roots for what many would consider a near-classic Sabbath song. The second side doesn’t contain anything as powerful as those two songs. If Paranoid contained nothing but “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and six songs from Julie Andrews, it would still be the greatest heavy metal album of all time. It lulls the listener into sleep for the shocking Iron Man. Planet Caravan is unique in the annals of Sabbath: a dream rendered in nightmare shapes that doesn’t bang a single head, unless you count Bill Ward’s bongoes. The song encapsulates everything that is great about Sabbath: head-banging riffs, profound sadness and more than a little madness. (In fact, there is some debate as to whether both bands belong in the prog category.) Paranoid, a track that Butler and Osbourne felt was an obvious ripoff of Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” (and, honestly, I still don’t make the connection), is now an acknowledged heavy metal classic. The nearly nine-minute epic on the evils of war, like the earlier work of Deep Purple, would seem to straddle the worlds of prog and metal. The band originally intended to name the album after its first track, War Pigs. Bill Ward’s explosive drumming, Tony Iommi’s supernatural guitar work, Geezer Butler’s burned-out bass and black magic poetry, and Ozzy with a Z’s zombified vocals were recorded by Rodger Bain in a sulfuric haze that distorted the senses in delicious darkness. If the band didn’t worry about getting the performances perfect, they didn’t need to they had already perfected their sound. Legend goes that Black Sabbath recorded Paranoid over the course of a few days, and that the song “ Paranoid” was recorded in less than an hour. (Led Zeppelin was a kind of musical god.) Deep Purple rocked just as hard, and often faster, but if Purple was the speed king, Sabbath was now the undisputed dark lord. The band’s second album is, in all ways, a bold step toward establishing their own unique brand of heavy metal. ![]() On Paranoid, they throw away the crutches and run headlong for the cliffs of reason. Black Sabbath, their first album, had sometimes steadied itself on the crutches of blues-rock. N o church bells this time, but an air siren to warn you of what’s to come. Kronomyth 2.0: Now the time is near for metal men to spread fear. If mankind dies and cockroaches inherit the earth, these songs will still be played… on tiny headphones.
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