Search Results for "Ozzy Osbourne"

Black Sabbath – Vol. 4 (1972) [Japanese Limited SHM-SACD 2012]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 42:58 minutes | Scans included | 1,74 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 844 MB

Uses 2012 DSD master based on the UK original analog tape. Reissue features the high-fidelity SHM-SACD format (fully compatible with standard SACD player, but it does not play on standard CD players). DSD Transferr

Vol. 4 is the point in Black Sabbath’s career where the band’s legendary drug consumption really starts to make itself felt. And it isn’t just in the lyrics, most of which are about the blurry line between reality and illusion. Vol. 4 has all the messiness of a heavy metal Exile on Main St., and if it lacks that album’s overall diversity, it does find Sabbath at their most musically varied, pushing to experiment amidst the drug-addled murk. As a result, there are some puzzling choices made here (not least of which is the inclusion of “FX”), and the album often contradicts itself. Ozzy Osbourne’s wail is becoming more powerful here, taking greater independence from Tony Iommi’s guitar riffs, yet his vocals are processed into a nearly textural element on much of side two. Parts of Vol. 4 are as ultra-heavy as Master of Reality, yet the band also takes its most blatant shots at accessibility to date — and then undercuts that very intent. The effectively concise “Tomorrow’s Dream” has a chorus that could almost be called radio-ready, were it not for the fact that it only appears once in the entire song. “St. Vitus Dance” is surprisingly upbeat, yet the distant-sounding vocals don’t really register. The notorious piano-and-Mellotron ballad “Changes” ultimately fails not because of its change-of-pace mood, but more for a raft of the most horrendously clichéd rhymes this side of “moon-June.” Even the crushing “Supernaut” — perhaps the heaviest single track in the Sabbath catalog — sticks a funky, almost danceable acoustic breakdown smack in the middle. Besides “Supernaut,” the core of Vol. 4 lies in the midtempo cocaine ode “Snowblind,” which was originally slated to be the album’s title track until the record company got cold feet, and the multi-sectioned prog-leaning opener, “Wheels of Confusion.” The latter is one of Iommi’s most complex and impressive compositions, varying not only riffs but textures throughout its eight minutes. Many doom and stoner metal aficionados prize the second side of the album, where Osbourne’s vocals gradually fade further and further away into the murk, and Iommi’s guitar assumes center stage. The underrated “Cornucopia” strikes a better balance of those elements, but by the time “Under the Sun” closes the album, the lyrics are mostly lost under a mountain of memorable, contrasting riffery. Add all of this up, and Vol. 4 is a less cohesive effort than its two immediate predecessors, but is all the more fascinating for it. Die-hard fans sick of the standards come here next, and some end up counting this as their favorite Sabbath record for its eccentricities and for its embodiment of the band’s excesses.

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Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath (1970) [Japanese Limited SHM-SACD 2012]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 37:57 minutes | Scans included | 1,53 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 765 MB

Uses 2012 DSD master based on the UK original analog tape. Reissue features the high-fidelity SHM-SACD format (fully compatible with standard SACD player, but it does not play on standard CD players). DSD Transferred by Richard Whittaker.

Black Sabbath’s debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this musical revolution — the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial nightmare of Birmingham; guitarist Tony Iommi’s loss of two fingertips, which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath’s signature style. These qualities set the band apart, but they weren’t wholly why this debut album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more. Sabbath’s genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. Take the legendary album-opening title cut. The standard pentatonic blues scale always added the tritone, or flatted fifth, as the so-called “blues note”; Sabbath simply extracted it and came up with one of the simplest yet most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time. Thematically, most of heavy metal’s great lyrical obsessions are not only here, they’re all crammed onto side one. “Black Sabbath,” “The Wizard,” “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” and “N.I.B.” evoke visions of evil, paganism, and the occult as filtered through horror films and the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dennis Wheatley. Even if the album ended here, it would still be essential listening. Unfortunately, much of side two is given over to loose blues-rock jamming learned through Cream, which plays squarely into the band’s limitations. For all his stylistic innovations and strengths as a composer, Iommi isn’t a hugely accomplished soloist. By the end of the murky, meandering, ten-minute cover of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation’s “Warning,” you can already hear him recycling some of the same simple blues licks he used on side one (plus, the word “warn” never even appears in the song, because Ozzy Osbourne misheard the original lyrics). (The British release included another cover, a version of Crow’s “Evil Woman” that doesn’t quite pack the muscle of the band’s originals; the American version substituted “Wicked World,” which is much preferred by fans.) But even if the seams are still showing on this quickly recorded document, Black Sabbath is nonetheless a revolutionary debut whose distinctive ideas merely await a bit more focus and development. Henceforth Black Sabbath would forge ahead with a vision that was wholly theirs.

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Black Sabbath – Heaven And Hell (1980) [Japanese Limited SHM-SACD 2012]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 39:41 minutes | Scans included | 1,61 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 833 MB

Reissue from Black Sabbath featuring the high-fidelity SHM-SACD format (fully compatible with standard SACD player, but it does not play on standard CD players) using the 2011 DSD master based on Japanese original analog tape. DSD Transferred by Manabu Matsumura.

Many had left Black Sabbath for dead at the dawn of the ’80s, and with good reason — the band’s last few albums were not even close to their early classics, and original singer Ozzy Osbourne had just split from the band. But the Sabs had found a worthy replacement in former Elf and Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio, and bounced back to issue their finest album since the early ’70s, 1980’s Heaven and Hell. The band sounds reborn and re-energized throughout. Several tracks easily rank among Sabbath’s all-time best, such as the vicious album opener, “Neon Knights,” the moody, mid-paced epic “Children of the Sea,” and the title track, which features one of Tony Iommi ‘s best guitar riffs. With Heaven and Hell, Black Sabbath were obviously back in business. Unfortunately, the Dio-led version of the band would only record one more studio album before splitting up (although Dio would return briefly in the early ’90s). One of Sabbath’s finest records.

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Black Sabbath – Paranoid (1970) [Japanese Limited SHM-SACD 2010]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 41:53 minutes | Scans included | 1,69 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 837 MB

Paranoid was not only Black Sabbath’s most popular record (it was a number one smash in the U.K., and “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” both scraped the U.S. charts despite virtually nonexistent radio play), it also stands as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time. Paranoid refined Black Sabbath’s signature sound — crushingly loud, minor-key dirges loosely based on heavy blues-rock — and applied it to a newly consistent set of songs with utterly memorable riffs, most of which now rank as all-time metal classics. Where the extended, multi-sectioned songs on the debut sometimes felt like aimless jams, their counterparts on Paranoid have been given focus and direction, lending an epic drama to now-standards like “War Pigs” and “Iron Man” (which sports one of the most immediately identifiable riffs in metal history). The subject matter is unrelentingly, obsessively dark, covering both supernatural/sci-fi horrors and the real-life traumas of death, war, nuclear annihilation, mental illness, drug hallucinations, and narcotic abuse. Yet Sabbath makes it totally convincing, thanks to the crawling, muddled bleakness and bad-trip depression evoked so frighteningly well by their music. Even the qualities that made critics deplore the album (and the group) for years increase the overall effect — the technical simplicity of Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals and Tony Iommi’s lead guitar vocabulary; the spots when the lyrics sink into melodrama or awkwardness; the lack of subtlety and the infrequent dynamic contrast. Everything adds up to more than the sum of its parts, as though the anxieties behind the music simply demanded that the band achieve catharsis by steamrolling everything in its path, including its own limitations. Monolithic and primally powerful, Paranoid defined the sound and style of heavy metal more than any other record in rock history.

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