Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

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Maybe there’s something about working in a haunted castle that brings out the best in musician. Written in the dungeon at Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England, <i>Sabbath Bloody Sabbath</i> is arguably Black Sabbath’s masterwork. Sure, the band members were occasionally spooked by the female ghost that reportedly occupied the premise, but that’s a small price to pay for greatne. Released in the fall of 1973, <i>Sabbath Bloody Sabbath</i> wa, at the time, the band’s most musically intricate and lyrically advanced album—the sound of four musicians maturing as musicians and writer, even while drowning in the booze and cocaine that would prove their undoing. “Living just for dying, dying just for you,” bassist Geezer Butler writes in the immortal title track and album’s sole single. It’s an acknowledgement of the band’s self-destructive lifestyle, brought on by the pressures of fame, succe, and—let’s face it—the band’s own choice. It’s a theme that Butler and his bandmates would echo on the underrated banger “Killing Yourself to Live,” which the bassist wrote while hospitalized for a kidney ailment brought on by excessive partying. The title track riff, though? It’s unstoppable. Guitarist Tony Iommi has called it “the riff that saved Black Sabbath” because it was the first thing he came up with for the album after suffering an extended and uncharacteristic bout of writer’s block. Meanwhile, Ozzy’s proclamation of “You bastards!” assaults the assaulter, the corporate overlord, and quasi-religious snake oil salesmen who manipulate mankind for sport and profit. Elsewhere on <i>Sabbath Bloody Sabbath</i>, the hugely hypnotic “A National Acrobat” and meticulously bombastic “Spiral Architect” explore, respectively, the intricacies of conception and DNA. Butler may have told Sabbath biographer Mick Wall that the former is “a song about wanking…from the sperm’s point of view,” but lines like “I’ve lived a thousand time, I found out what it means to be believed” reveal a deeper, more philosophical perspective. “Fluff,” meanwhile, is the longest and most complex of the instrumental pieces that Iommi had begun including on Sabbath album, starting with 1971’s <i>Master of Reality</i> (the title is a nod to DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman, one of the few DJs to play Sabbath on the air back in those days). .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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