THKD’s Top 100 Metal Albums #24: Black Sabbath – Paranoid (Vertigo Records, 1970)

On February 13th, 1970, Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut album, inventing heavy metal in the process. But in September of that same year, they unleashed the genre’s bible. While Black Sabbath saw the quartet still working to fully define their musical path, Paranoid was the sound of a band that had tapped into the source from which all metal has flowed for the last fifty-plus years.

Black Sabbath wasn’t the first metal band I heard; that honor falls to Metallica. But I was lucky enough to hear them during my formative years, and while hearing “Black Sabbath” for the first time on a good set of headphones gave me the chills, it was the entirety of Paranoid that made me understand why Sabbath was the one true heavy metal godhead.

That’s because Paranoid is a murderer’s row of incredible songs, starting with “War Pigs.” Catchy without being conventional, progressive without disappearing up its own ass and heavy as hell, “War Pigs” is one of Sabbath’s greatest achievements, a deep, dark and tension-filled rumination on the evils of warfare. When one considers that the world was only a few years removed from the Vietnam War’s bloodiest period, the song takes on even more meaning. According to Wikipedia, bassist Geezer Butler has been quoted as saying that the song is “totally against the Vietnam War, about how these rich politicians and rich people start all the wars for their benefit and get all the poor people to die for them.” The image of corrupt politicians being put to judgment for their corruption remains a powerful one, especially in the post-Trump era.

Kicking off your album with one of the greatest metal tracks of all time would be a ridiculously bold move for just about any other band, but Sabbath’s songwriting throughout Paranoid is so excellent throughout that it doesn’t that album doesn’t feel front-loaded. “War Pigs” is followed by the urgent title track, a short, sharp shock of a song that almost feels like proto-punk and then into the ultra-trippy “Planet Caravan.” “Paranoid” was written in the studio as a filler track, but if there’s one to be learned here it’s that a throwaway Sabbath track from this era of band blows roughly 99.9% of other heavy band’s best songs out of the goddamn water and as such it ended up becoming one of the band’s signature songs. “Planet Caravan” on the other hand is one of the Sabs’ most underrated tracks, a musical trip to the far reaches of space that sounds great when you’re sober but even better with the assistance of a dimly lit room and some primo weed.

“Iron Man” closes out side A of Paranoid and I’m not sure what more can be said about this track other than it is heavy metal personified. From Tony Iommi’s monstrous, world-beating guitar-work, to Ozzy’s maniacal vocals, to the mind-blowing outro that shows why Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are the best metal rhythm section of all time, “Iron Man” is yet another stunning achievement in the Sabbath canon and contains what is quite simply one of the greatest riffs ever written. “Iron Man” is also the track that most folks associate with Black Sabbath and with good reason.

Of course, as amazing as side A of Paranoid is, side B is certainly no slouch, beginning with the devastating duo of “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom.” Taken together, these songs are the songwriting blueprints for pretty much every stoner doom band ever. “Electric Funeral,” begins with a creepy main riff and haunting vocals, becomes frantic around the two-minute mark and then settles back down into a dying man’s crawl before fading back into the abyss from whence it came. “Hand of Doom” on the other, uh, hand, is an atmospheric doom workout that makes excellent use of dynamics and is one my favorite songs from the Sab four. The way the different sections of the song flow into each other is nothing short of masterful, emphasizing yet again the band’s masterful songwriting and musicianship.

Whereas the the first thirty-five minutes and forty-five seconds of Paranoid are serious as a heart attack, the final six minutes and fifteen seconds showcase Black Sabbath at their most playful. “Fairies Wear Boots” is a tale of coming home late at night (presumably after one hell of a bender) to see “a fairy with boots on dancin’ with a dwarf.” The song sees Iommi and Co. returning to their bluesy roots with a shuffling rhythm and a lead-heavy central riff to finish out the album, perfectly capping off eight tracks of absolute metal mastery.

More than any other Black Sabbath album, Paranoid is the one that blew my young mind and in revisiting the album to write this piece, it’s pretty easy to see why. This is the goddamn urtext, nothing more, nothing less, ’nuff said, true believer!

Read other entries in THKD’s Top 100 Metal Albums.

The Contraption (1977)

I first watched The Contraption late one night on the USA Network as a child and it has haunted the hell out of me ever since.  After many years of its twisted imagery rattling around in the back of my brain I finally found it on YouTube, and even though writing about films isn’t really my forte, I couldn’t help but share this psychological horror masterpiece with all of you.

Get Hexed

Regular IG readers and especially those that know me outside of music blog land are well aware of my affection for John Carpenter, and a sizable chunk of that affection is based on his soundtrack work.  Films such as Halloween and Escape from New York simply wouldn’t be as effective without Carpenter’s sinister, tension-filled electronic soundscapes as accompaniment.

Samhain @ The Warfield, San Francisco, CA 09/20/14

 

Longtime THKD readers will recall that late last year I finally got to see Danzig live after being a fan of the man and his music for twenty years.  Considering the fact that the set included a slew of Danzig classics + a mini-set of Misfits songs featuring Doyle Wolfgang Von Frankenstein on guitar, I was convinced that I could pretty much die happy.

Mortician’s (death) metal machine music.

In recent weeks I’ve made several attempts to contact New York death metal duo Mortician for an interview.  Those attempts were not responded to.  The band hasn’t released an album since 2004’s Re-Animated Dead Flesh and only plays a handful of live shows a year, so one can only assume that this relative lack of activity has something to do with it.  I can’t say I blame them.  But, I’ve wanted to write about Mortician for a long time, and even without an upcoming national tour or new album on the way, there is still much about the band’s totally unique and oft-misunderstood take on death metal that’s worthy of discussion.

Blitzkrieg #7: Metal vs. Religion

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, metal gave me the strength to accept my budding Atheism during my youth.  I wish I could say there was some epiphanic moment that came late one night while listening to Reign in Blood, but the truth is that metal’s part in the formation of my beliefs was much more subtle.  Reflecting back on those times, I’ve come to realize that my Atheism manifested itself long before my love of metal did, and that metal only helped to cement those beliefs.

I went to Catholic school from kindergarten all the way up through my senior year of high school.  A lot of people still have some interesting ideas of what Catholic school is like, but I can assure you there were no draconian nuns in black lording over us with yardsticks and paddles, nor were we forced to go to church every day.  That doesn’t mean that the presence of the almighty didn’t loom over us on a daily basis.  We did have an extra period for religion class,  and although we didn’t go to church every day, there were still multiple opportunities to kneel before the saviour, any excuse to have a mass in the gymnasium or set up confessionals in the auditorium.

I tried my damnedest to believe.  I folded my hands, closed my eyes, drank the grape juice, ate the stale crackers (why does the body of Christ taste like cardboard and glue?), and none of it worked.  I participated willingly in the three c’s, communion, confirmation and confession, but felt no closer to any “God”.  For the longest time, I felt like there was something wrong with me, like I was the only one in the world that didn’t believe.  There was nothing I could do about it, no one I was comfortable talking to.  If there were others like me, they were keeping it well hidden.

I bet you’re gonna like it in A.D. (or the first trve black metal album).

“When you feel like you’re going too slow / I bet you’re gonna like it in / A.D. A.D / People gonna talk about / A.D. A.D. / Bloody hell and sacrifice”
-“Earth A.D.”

I’ve been listening to the Misfit’s Earth A.D. for over a decade now.  Every time I listen to it, I hear something different.  Sometimes I hear a bruising hardcore album.  Sometimes I hear proto-thrash.  I most often hear the roots of black metal.  Is it a mere coincidence that Quorthon started Bathory the same year or that Slayer’s Show No Mercy was released the same month?  Sure, Venom’s Welcome to Hell and Black Metal albums had already been released by the time Earth A.D. hit record store shelves.  But the Misfits of Earth A.D. possessed several things that Cronos and his cohorts, or just about any of the proto-black metal bands for that matter, severely lacked.

The first of these key components is speed.  I recently read in Steven Blush’s book American Hardcore  that Glenn Danzig had tried to get the rest of the Misfits to play slower during the sessions.  Thank goodness he wasn’t successful.  To my knowledge, the blast beat hadn’t been invented yet in 1983 (Mick Harris didn’t join Napalm Death until 1985), but the blistering speed of Earth A.D. often comes close.  A huge part of the album’s power comes from the reckless abandon with which the band plows through songs like “Earth A.D.” and “Demonomania”.  It’s a ragged, violent speed, the kind of speed that sounds like the band is going to fly apart at the seams at any given moment.  Somehow, the Misfits keep it together for the original album’s fourteen-odd minutes (reissues would include the tracks from the posthumous “Die, Die My Darling” single), but the approach lends a sense of real danger, menace and foreboding to the proceedings that would also be present on second wave Scandinavian black metal albums such as Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas or Burzum’s self titled debut.

The second element that pushes Earth A.D. over the edge is brutality.  Unfortunately the word “brutal” (and every permutation thereof) has been thrown around in the heavy music world so often that it has lost nearly all of its meaning as of 2011.  This is a brutal album.  Primitive, barbaric, nasty.  Black and death metal bands surely took a great deal of inspiration from the positively corrosive assault of songs like “Death Comes Ripping” and “Hellhound”.  Danzig himself sounds like a snarling hellhound throughout Earth A.D., ready to claw his way through your speakers and “rip your face off” while the rest of the band violates their instruments in a manner that’s probably legally questionable in more than a few countries.  Earth A.D. was the first Misfits recording where the aggression of the playing and production scheme matched the violence of Danzig’s lyrics.  It’s a level of rubbed-raw vitriol that makes early Venom, Slayer, Celtic Frost et al sound quaint by comparison.

What about atmosphere?  Earth A.D.‘s got it in spades.  Granted, this probably speaks more to Spot’s ineptitude as a producer/engineer (see also: Black Flag’s Damaged) or the lack of a recording budget (probably both), than it does to any grand design by Danzig and Co.  Still, the vibe of the album is pitch black and claustrophobic, it reeks of rage, hate and desperation.  It’s a document of a band ready to explode and doing their damnedest to take all of us down with them.  The fact that the Misfits broke up only a few months after the album was recorded (on Halloween, 1983) leads me to believe that the palpable fury bursting out of every part of Earth A.D. is much more than just for entertainment value (“and that blood’s so real / ’cause I just can’t fake it”).

If all of this doesn’t make for proto-black metal, then I don’t know what does.  Add the grotesque, lovably amateurish artwork and black and white band photos, and you’ve got the blueprints for the sound, style and overall aesthetic that Darkthrone would take to the next level almost a decade later with A Blaze in the Northern Sky.  Some call Earth A.D. “the speed metal bible”.  I’m more inclined to think it’s the goddamn Necronomicon.

Beware the Misfits

In honor of Halloween, I thought I would take a moment to divert from the regularly scheduled THKD programming.  Do not attempt to adjust your monitor.  I control the horizontal.  I control the vertical.  Now that I have your undivided attention, I want to take a moment to a talk a little about a band known as the Misfits.

For me, the Misfits are synonymous with the Halloween season and are one of my all-time favorite bands.  My reputation as a Glenn Danzig fanboy is well documented.  But what might not be so well-documented is that the Misfits represent my favorite phase of the man’s career.  Like many folks from my generation, I was introduced to them thanks to Metallica’s “Last Caress/Green Hell” cover.  That was a great version, but nothing compared to when I heard the Misfits playing their own songs for the first time. Mind officially blown.  It was as if someone combined everything I loved about music into one band, and then added a visual and lyrical aesthetic that represented everything I loved about vintage horror and science fiction films.  I remember buying Collection I and listening to it over and over and over again in junior high (especially “Where Eagles Dare”!).  Back then, information on the Misfits was scarce (at least in the Midwest), and since Danzig famously hated talking about the band at that time (no doubt due to the legal bullshit going on between him and Only), I could only speculate about the band’s origins.  I was so fucking excited to find a Misfits shirt (XL and baggy as all hell on my tall scrawny frame, just how I liked it) at my local record store, before the band’s “Crimson Ghost” logo became ubiquitous.  I wore that thing until it disintegrated.

Very few bands are perfect.  The Misfits were one of them.  I’m not talking about the Jerry Only-fronted abomination that parades around today calling itself the Misfits.  I’m talking about the band as it existed from 1977 to 1983.  From songs to style to imagery, the Misfits had it all, an often duplicated but never equalled head-on collision of punk rock filth, ’50s rock catchiness and melody, gothic atmosphere and too much horror business.  Glenn Danzig’s lyrics were a heady blend of twisted pop culture references, nihilism and misogyny.  His backing band, consisting of bassist Jerry Only, a range of guitarists that included Only’s brother Doyle, Bobby Steele and Franche Coma, and a revolving door of drummers that put Spinal Tap to shame, created a sound that was unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.  The fact that stories of alleged grave-robbing and excessive violence (the song “London Dungeon” was supposedly the result of Danzig and Steele spending the night in an English jail after a punch up with some skinheads) were part of the Misfits mythos made them even more intriguing, if such a thing were possible.

The Misfits took the innocence of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll and forever corrupted it.  They bathed Elvis Presley in the blood, brains and skull fragments of the Kennedy assassination. Punk rock was founded on speeding up and ripping off Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore riffs, but the Misfits brought a darkness and foreboding to the style in the same way that Black Sabbath brought it to the blues in the early ’70s.  They were also better song-writers than any other punk band ever, writing some of the flat-out catchiest choruses ever put to tape (“I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch, you better think about it baby!”, “Sweet lovely death, I am waiting for your breath…”, etc.).  But the band’s real area of expertise is what I refer to as “the whoah-whoah part”.  The whoah-whoah part crops up in numerous Misfits songs (“Mephisto Waltz”, “I Turned into a Martian”, “Astro Zombies” and “Some Kinda Hate” to name just a few.) and is the single most infectious aspect of the band’s playbook.  The level of craftsmanship the Misfits displayed was so far ahead of the curve in every aspect; it’s a fucking travesty that they continue to be left out of the punk rock history books.

The Misfits might not get the respect they deserve, but that’s beside the point.  The fact that they have influenced everything from thrash to black metal to gothic rock to doom says a lot more about the band than some jag-off rock critic who refuses to acknowledge their greatness.  For me personally, a lot of bands have come and gone over the years, but the Misfits sound just as exciting, vital and visceral today as they did when I heard them for the first time in 7th grade.  They are total fucking anarchy by way of an alien invasion/zombie outbreak, lead by the reanimated corpses of Vampira and Marilyn Monroe.  They are the soundtrack to an Autumn filled with “brown leaf vertigo / where skeletal life is known”.  They are the Misfits.  Beware.

Interview: HOODED MENACE

Hooded Menace’s Never Cross the Dead is one of my favorite albums of 2010.  It’s a sickening slab of vintage-style death/doom with no shortage of gnarly slow-motion riffs, not to mention some genuinely creepy, catchy melodies that will lodge themselves in your skull like the rusty swords of the bloodthirsty Blind Dead.  I contacted Hooded Menace mainman Lasse Pyykko via e-mail for the following in-depth interrogation.

New faux-Misfits songs: Pretty much the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

Jerry Only should really be ashamed of himself at this point.  When he (along with brother/guitarist Doyle) originally resurrected the Misfits name back in 1997 with the American Psycho album, I had some pretty high hopes, in spite of my undying allegiance to original Misfits singer Glenn Danzig.  Michael Graves was a solid new vocalist, and the songs were catchy and heavy.  Even if they didn’t touch the heights of classic Misfits material, at least they weren’t dragging the name through the mud, and I came to think of the “nu-Misfits” as an entirely separate band, allowing myself to enjoy them without worrying too much about the legacy factor.