Pouring rain, rolling thunder, a church bell tolling in the distance. Already you are in a cold and lonely place, shivering as the downpour soaks you to the skin. The last train left hours ago, there’s nowhere to shelter from the storm except beneath the bare branches of gnarled winter trees. The sleeping village mocks you with its inhuman silence. Then, out of nowhere, three notes from a Gibson SG echo the doleful rhythm of the tolling bell and your fate is sealed, all hope of escape fading fast. You're doomed[$italics].
"What is this that stands before me?/Figure in black which points at me."
The opening title song of Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album witnesses blues-influenced rock 'n' roll giving way to something darker, harder, thematically more phantasmagorical and baroque yet structurally more primal and neanderthal. With three notes strung together utilising the notorious Devil's Triad or tritone - an interval spanning six semitones, banned in the middle ages for its allegedly diabolical properties - guitarist Tony Iommi, vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward departed from the more traditional blues-based rock of contemporaries such as Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin and set to work on the pitch-black cauldron of weirdness and wonder that is Heavy Metal. While the aformentioned bands undoubtedly contributed to the foundation of the genre, Sabbath were the first fully-formed metal band, and they alone lay claim to being the originators of one of its hardiest and most adaptable subdivisions. Doom. The torpid, dragging tempos, the sudden accelerations, the sonorous, sustained chords, the lyrics of unremitting misery... all the elements fell into place with this one song.
Every permutation of doom - from the genre’s inception in the early ‘80s via Trouble, St. Vitus and Candlemass, right up to the present day - can be viewed as having been derived from the innovations of the classic Sabbath line-up. True doom, funeral doom, sludge doom, drone doom, all of these draw from the blackened wellspring of Iommi and co, each being magnifications of specific elements of the early Sabbath sound. Bands as varied as Solitude Aeturnus, Cathedral, Sunn 0))), Unearthly Trance, Saint Vitus, Corrupted, Sleep, Confessor and Reverend Bizarre owe their very existence to these hallowed masters of misery. Whether they focus on atmosphere, thematic grandiosity or simply slow, downtuned riffing, the shadow of Sabbath hangs heavy over these acolytes of doom.
But if it hadn't been for a factory accident that left riffmaster general Tony Iommi without two of his fretting fingertips, doom as we know it might not exist at all. Unable to comfortably play a conventionally-tuned guitar, Iommi opted for a lower tuning which elicited a deeper, heavier tone from his SG (Geezer Butler also downtuned his bass in order to play along) while the looser strings made pitch-bending an easier option. Filtered through a post-Hendrix/Yardbirds prism of volume and distortion, Iommi's fluid, jazz-inspired playing took on new extreme qualities ranging from the queasy and vertiginous to the oppressively monolithic, setting Sabbath apart from their contemporaries on the British club circuit and proving massively influential on the doom generation to come. As veteran UK rock critic Simon Reynolds points out, “Even in manic mode, Sabbath always sound depressed. Tony Iommi's down-tuned guitar, in tandem with the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, creates sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, viscous terrain, the weight of the world on your shoulders.” This serves by extension as an accurate description of the physical and psychological effects of doom. Like codeine, weed and alcohol, doom is a highly addictive depressant. It enables the listener to let themselves go, but not in the accepted sense of disinhibition and party-hearty positivity. Rather, it offers an opportunity to discover just how low as you can sink without hitting rock bottom, to wallow in the negative aspects of life without the risk of self-annihilation.
When discussing Black Sabbath's influence on the doom metal genre it is absolutely vital to acknowledge the insane howl and gonzoid presence of one John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne. An ex-burglar and all-round delinquent, Osbourne made a rather unorthodox rock star. No tousled sexbomb in the Robert Plant mould, and by no means the best singer in the world, Osbourne was nevertheless blessed/cursed with an untutored yowl that mirrored the band’s capacity for fearsome intensity and cosmic gloom. Ozzy's voice was sick, weird, baleful and defiantly unsexy, a sharp contrast to from the priapic yowl of the typical ‘70s hard rock frontman. His lugubrious tones achieve an especially chilling effect on the band's darkest, doomiest songs. When Osbourne screams "No, no, no, please God help me!" on ‘Black Sabbath’, he expresses one of humanity's deepest and most persistent 'irrational' fears - that of eternal damnation - with a conviction few contemporary death-grunters or emo-screamers could ever approach. Osbourne was also adept at playing the part of Satan, as such in-character songs as 'Lord Of This World' and 'N.I.B.' illustrate. Ozzy delivers the cautionary lyric of the former with diabolical glee ("Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love") while the latter, Geezer’s tale of redemptive love between Satan and a mortal woman, indicates one of Ozzy’s greatest achievements as a vocalist; that of locating the human in the uncanny, making it even more terrifying in the process. Many a doom wailer has sought to emulate Osbourne's distinctive style, including Bobby Leibling (Pentagram), Scott 'Wino' Weinrich (Saint Vitus/The Obsessed/Spirit Caravan/The Hidden Hand) and Messiah Marcolin (Candlemass). All these singers have their individual merits and are influential figures in their own right, but it’s impossible to overstate their debt to the original Voice Of Doom.
So, what compelled Ozzy and his compadres to make such an unholy noise? In order to answer that question it’s necessary to look at the context from which the band emerged. Black Sabbath formed during a period of cultural flux, the point at which the colour began to drain from the psychedelic ‘60s. Coming from Aston, a grimy suburb of Birmingham blown apart by German bombs during World War II, Sabbath had little truck with the facile ‘peace ‘n’ love’ platitudes of the hippy dream. As Ozzy told biographer Steven Rosen, “We got tired of all the bullshit - love your brother and flower power forever, meeting a little chick on the corner and you’re hung up on her and all this. We brought things down to reality.” The late ‘60s and early ‘70s presented people with the flipside of the hippy dream, a brutal era of disappointment and distrust encompassing Altamont, Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and rock star corpses left, right and centre. Sabbath were one of the first bands to capitalise on the new pessimism and amplify the despair of their beloved blues to cosmic extremes. Although the occasional glimmer of hope shone through songs such as 'Children Of The Grave' and 'Sabbra Cadabra', Sabbath’s response to this world gone wrong was typically disengagement ('Sweet Leaf', 'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Hole In The Sky') or outright disgust ('War Pigs', 'Killing Yourself To Live', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'). This uniquely slothful brand of misanthropic angst runs like a stagnant river through the six albums spanning the period 1970 to 1975.
'Black Sabbath', 'Paranoid', 'Master Of Reality', 'Volume 4', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' and 'Sabotage' are considered by the majority of Sabbath devotees to represent the real Black Sabbath, and rightly so. Over the course of these albums the band redefined what it meant to be ‘heavy’. Previously this was a vague term employed by hippies to describe anything meaningful or intense. In this sense, ‘Heavy’ might encompass anything from Pink Floyd and Yes to Traffic and The Grateful Dead. But Black Sabbath made music that was devastatingly heavy in form, content, execution and effect. The churning guitars and piledriving rhythms were more powerful and focused than anything else rock ‘n’ roll had to offer at that point and the utter despair of the lyrics contrasted sharply with the tales of topographic oceans favoured by the flouncy art-rockers of the time. Although the debut album constituted a formidable opening statement, their metallic sound would become fully realised on 'Paranoid', released later that same year. Extended instrumental jamming gave way to tighter songs written around slow, repetitive riffing and simple melodies. 'Iron Man', 'Hand Of Doom' and 'Electric Funeral' further refined the proto-doom of the previous album’s title track, reigning in the band’s excesses yet maximising their apocalyptic heaviness.
1971 saw the release of the third Sabbath album, 'Master of Reality'. Often considered the definitive blueprint for all doom metal, it’s also the band’s most consistent collection of songs. What self-respecting doomhead could argue with the descending stoner-riff of 'Sweet Leaf', the galloping charge of 'Children Of The Grave', the demiurgic belch of 'Lord Of This World' or the intergalactic trawl of 'Into The Void'? Tony Iommi has since expressed reservations regarding the album’s production, but in truth Master Of Reality sounds utterly astonishing to this day, a thick, muddy quagmire of majestically dragging riffs, head-smacking rhythms and unhinged prophet-of-doom vocals. Perhaps one of the reasons it sounds still sounds so contemporary is that it has been so ruthlessly plundered by countless doom metal bands, most of whom could only dream of achieving similar levels of cosmic melancholy.
1972’s ‘Volume 4’, though worshipped by many, seems something of a retreat from the troglodytic momentum of the previous record. Hints of jazz, blues and boogie creep in here and there, recalling the syncopated swing of the Earth years. That said, the tracks in which these influences are most conspicuous -'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Supernaut', 'St. Vitus’ Dance' - are awesome pieces of music featuring some brilliantly infectious riffing from Iommi. The doom element of Volume 4 is provided by 'Snowblind', 'Wheels Of Confusion', 'Cornucopia' and 'Under The Sun', tales of pain, insanity and drug abuse set to riffs of ludicrous weight and girth.
Perhaps understandably, having sold doomloads of records, toured the world and gained access to ever more sophisticated recording facilities, Tony Iommi felt the urge to branch out. This desire may also have been inspired by the fact that with the exception of US legend Lester Bangs and a few others, rock critics hated the band, viewing them as somewhat retarded in comparison to the more cerebral likes of Yes and King Crimson. Hence 1973’s 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' saw the introduction of mellotrons, moogs and orchestras in an effort to expand the band’s musical horizons. It worked. If there was ever a metallic equivalent to the ornate 60s pop of late-period Beatles and Beach Boys, this was it. Not only that, but Sabbath had managed to retain their crucial heaviness. The title track, 'A National Acrobat' and 'Killing Yourself To Live' are key doom texts, the latter featuring the single most depressing lyric of Sabbath’s career (“Just take a look around and what do you see/Pain suffering and misery/It’s not the way that the world was meant/It’s a pity you don’t understand”). Curiously enough, the album’s most audacious experiment was written by Ozzy. The slow, grinding tempo and insistent riff of 'Who Are You' were nothing new but the substitution of moogs for guitars was an unexpected stroke of genius, predating the synth-based space-doom of Italian mentalists Ufommamut by over 30 years.
1975’s Sabotage continued in this experimental-yet-brutal vein, with Iommi piling on the synths and keyboards and even embellishing the industrial-strength riff of 'Supertzar' with a Russian choir. But there were also a couple of future doom standards amongst the kitchen-sink excess. The rabid retreatism of 'Hole In The Sky' would inspire a deranged cover by North Carolina eccentrics Confessor in 1992, while the bruising opening riff of 'Megalomania' harked back to the primal sludge of the ‘Paranoid’ album. Though not strictly doomish - in fact more reminiscent of The Who at their most symphonic and progressive - the stately pace and skull-crushing heaviosity of closing epic 'The Writ' illustrated that Iommi’s growing eclecticism did not necessarily entail any loss of power.
Sadly this wasn’t the case with Sabbath’s final two albums with Ozzy, 1976’s 'Technical Ecstasy' and 1978’s 'Never Say Die', records seldom referenced by anyone, let alone doom metallers. Although both deserving of critical reappraisal if only for their frequently mind-buggering strangeness (Funk? Horn sections? Bill Ward singing?) these records were the sound of the Black Sabbath’s original line-up unspooling. On Technical Ecstasy, the opening riff of 'You Won’t Change Me' carried all the dread and foreboding of earlier works, and 'Dirty Women' would become a staple of their live set upon reuniting in 1997, but these were isolated links to a glorious past. Similarly, 'Never Say Die' would have been a great rock album by any other band, but it completely lacked the combination of punkish aggression and skin-crawling atmosphere which had made the earlier albums so enthralling. Before long Ozzy was out and the nightmare was over. For a while, at least.
As with most influential groups, there was more to Black Sabbath than just the music. Doom metal’s visual aesthetic - skulls, crucifixes, religious iconography and gothic imagery - also owes a great deal to the band’s gloriously morbid image, masterminded by Geezer Butler. The band had been labouring under various names including Polka Tulk Blues Band and Earth until, as legend has it, Geezer clocked the title of a Mario Bava film and suggested a name and image change to his bandmates. His contention was that people paid good money to be scared shitless by horror films, so why not apply the same logic to rock ‘n’ roll? This idea was not entirely without precedent - Screaming Lord Sutch and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins spring to mind - but the embryonic Black Sabbath embraced the grand guignol aspect in a much more substantial manner, dressing in black, posing with skulls for publicity photographs, playing songs with occult themes and cultivating an atmosphere of darkness that established doom metal’s ongoing flirtation with all things morose and macabre.
Despite the fact that many Sabbath songs explore the character of Satan and deal with themes of death, madness and torment, lyrically, Sabbath were far from 100% evil. The sentiments expressed in songs such as 'After Forever' and 'Lord Of This World' are entirely consistent with Christian philosophy, and may even sound a little preachy to modern ears. It's therefore no coincidence that doom metal is similarly preoccupied with sin, repentance, redemption and damnation, as the works of Candlemass, Pentagram, Cathedral and Trouble illustrate. Pentagram's 'All Your Sins' is an almost parodically pious warning of the bad shit to come if one refuses to repent ("You're gonna BURN now!"), the early work of Christian doomheads Trouble is awash with titles such as 'Psalm 9' and 'The Tempter' and Candlemass even attempted their own account of the Old Testament with 1989's 'Tales Of Creation while vocalist Messiah Marcolin pranced around in a monk’s habit. Fear of God and Devil form an important ingredient of the doom worldview. Whereas death and black metal often concern themselves with the pros and cons of antisocial behaviour such as mutilation and church-burning, doom is more concerned with the relentless torment of existence and the terrible punishment that awaits at its end if you fail to bear the weight of wordly misery with good grace. Doom is therefore a deeply moral strain of metal. As Sunn 0)))’s Stephen O’Malley points out, the word ‘doom’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘dom’, meaning judgement or law, referring to an unavoidable fate. Or, more specifically, punishment from God.
Black Sabbath's early work is permanently enshrined in metal legend. But can any of Sabbath’s later albums be said to have had any influence on the development of doom? Most attempts fill Ozzy’s platforms have drawn sniffs of derision, especially on albums where Iommi is the only link to the classic line-up. But while the Dio era receives recognition for such doom-defining artefacts as 'Children Of The Sea' and 'The Sign Of The Southern Cross', there are also occasional echoes of former glories in Sabbath’s post-Dio, pre-reunion wilderness years. 'Zero The Hero' (from 1983’s 'Born Again') is perhaps the finest example of this, featuring two of Iommi’s finest, most cataclysmically evil doom-riffs, as well as a crazed performance from Ian Gillan. The Glenn Hughes era is perhaps best ignored ('No Stranger To Love'? No thanks) but skipping ahead to 1994's 'Cross Purposes' we find the dejected dirge of 'Virtual Death'. The single most impressive product of the Tony Martin-fronted era, this eerie crawl sticks out like a severed digit amongst the disappointingly uptempo numbers that characterise the rest of the record.
Jumping back a couple of years, 1992’s 'Dehumanizer' is possibly the most overlooked entry in the entire Sabbath canon. This ultimately failed attempt at a reconciliation with Ronnie James Dio is notable for being the most doom-laden album the band had released since the Ozzy era. 'After All (The Dead)', 'Letters From Earth' and 'Computer God' all boast monstrous riffing and Dio singing in a more aggressive style than usual, even letting loose a couple of Ozzyisms now and then (check his “Allll-riiight!” on 'Letters From Earth'). However unsatisfactory for the singer, the experience seemed to provide his solo career with a much needed shot of adrenalin. Dio’s subsequent 'Strange Highways' and 'Angry Machines' albums were to be the heaviest - and doomiest - of his career.
Instances of latterday greatness aside, it cannot be denied that the fundamentals of doom metal were established by those first six albums and the dark magic created by Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward. Better musicians may have passed through the ranks, but the chemistry between those four stoned and angry young men from Aston has never been equalled. Are Black Sabbath the spiral architects of doom metal? Without a doubt.
"What is this that stands before me?/Figure in black which points at me."
The opening title song of Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album witnesses blues-influenced rock 'n' roll giving way to something darker, harder, thematically more phantasmagorical and baroque yet structurally more primal and neanderthal. With three notes strung together utilising the notorious Devil's Triad or tritone - an interval spanning six semitones, banned in the middle ages for its allegedly diabolical properties - guitarist Tony Iommi, vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward departed from the more traditional blues-based rock of contemporaries such as Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin and set to work on the pitch-black cauldron of weirdness and wonder that is Heavy Metal. While the aformentioned bands undoubtedly contributed to the foundation of the genre, Sabbath were the first fully-formed metal band, and they alone lay claim to being the originators of one of its hardiest and most adaptable subdivisions. Doom. The torpid, dragging tempos, the sudden accelerations, the sonorous, sustained chords, the lyrics of unremitting misery... all the elements fell into place with this one song.
Every permutation of doom - from the genre’s inception in the early ‘80s via Trouble, St. Vitus and Candlemass, right up to the present day - can be viewed as having been derived from the innovations of the classic Sabbath line-up. True doom, funeral doom, sludge doom, drone doom, all of these draw from the blackened wellspring of Iommi and co, each being magnifications of specific elements of the early Sabbath sound. Bands as varied as Solitude Aeturnus, Cathedral, Sunn 0))), Unearthly Trance, Saint Vitus, Corrupted, Sleep, Confessor and Reverend Bizarre owe their very existence to these hallowed masters of misery. Whether they focus on atmosphere, thematic grandiosity or simply slow, downtuned riffing, the shadow of Sabbath hangs heavy over these acolytes of doom.
But if it hadn't been for a factory accident that left riffmaster general Tony Iommi without two of his fretting fingertips, doom as we know it might not exist at all. Unable to comfortably play a conventionally-tuned guitar, Iommi opted for a lower tuning which elicited a deeper, heavier tone from his SG (Geezer Butler also downtuned his bass in order to play along) while the looser strings made pitch-bending an easier option. Filtered through a post-Hendrix/Yardbirds prism of volume and distortion, Iommi's fluid, jazz-inspired playing took on new extreme qualities ranging from the queasy and vertiginous to the oppressively monolithic, setting Sabbath apart from their contemporaries on the British club circuit and proving massively influential on the doom generation to come. As veteran UK rock critic Simon Reynolds points out, “Even in manic mode, Sabbath always sound depressed. Tony Iommi's down-tuned guitar, in tandem with the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, creates sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, viscous terrain, the weight of the world on your shoulders.” This serves by extension as an accurate description of the physical and psychological effects of doom. Like codeine, weed and alcohol, doom is a highly addictive depressant. It enables the listener to let themselves go, but not in the accepted sense of disinhibition and party-hearty positivity. Rather, it offers an opportunity to discover just how low as you can sink without hitting rock bottom, to wallow in the negative aspects of life without the risk of self-annihilation.
When discussing Black Sabbath's influence on the doom metal genre it is absolutely vital to acknowledge the insane howl and gonzoid presence of one John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne. An ex-burglar and all-round delinquent, Osbourne made a rather unorthodox rock star. No tousled sexbomb in the Robert Plant mould, and by no means the best singer in the world, Osbourne was nevertheless blessed/cursed with an untutored yowl that mirrored the band’s capacity for fearsome intensity and cosmic gloom. Ozzy's voice was sick, weird, baleful and defiantly unsexy, a sharp contrast to from the priapic yowl of the typical ‘70s hard rock frontman. His lugubrious tones achieve an especially chilling effect on the band's darkest, doomiest songs. When Osbourne screams "No, no, no, please God help me!" on ‘Black Sabbath’, he expresses one of humanity's deepest and most persistent 'irrational' fears - that of eternal damnation - with a conviction few contemporary death-grunters or emo-screamers could ever approach. Osbourne was also adept at playing the part of Satan, as such in-character songs as 'Lord Of This World' and 'N.I.B.' illustrate. Ozzy delivers the cautionary lyric of the former with diabolical glee ("Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love") while the latter, Geezer’s tale of redemptive love between Satan and a mortal woman, indicates one of Ozzy’s greatest achievements as a vocalist; that of locating the human in the uncanny, making it even more terrifying in the process. Many a doom wailer has sought to emulate Osbourne's distinctive style, including Bobby Leibling (Pentagram), Scott 'Wino' Weinrich (Saint Vitus/The Obsessed/Spirit Caravan/The Hidden Hand) and Messiah Marcolin (Candlemass). All these singers have their individual merits and are influential figures in their own right, but it’s impossible to overstate their debt to the original Voice Of Doom.
So, what compelled Ozzy and his compadres to make such an unholy noise? In order to answer that question it’s necessary to look at the context from which the band emerged. Black Sabbath formed during a period of cultural flux, the point at which the colour began to drain from the psychedelic ‘60s. Coming from Aston, a grimy suburb of Birmingham blown apart by German bombs during World War II, Sabbath had little truck with the facile ‘peace ‘n’ love’ platitudes of the hippy dream. As Ozzy told biographer Steven Rosen, “We got tired of all the bullshit - love your brother and flower power forever, meeting a little chick on the corner and you’re hung up on her and all this. We brought things down to reality.” The late ‘60s and early ‘70s presented people with the flipside of the hippy dream, a brutal era of disappointment and distrust encompassing Altamont, Vietnam, the Watergate scandal and rock star corpses left, right and centre. Sabbath were one of the first bands to capitalise on the new pessimism and amplify the despair of their beloved blues to cosmic extremes. Although the occasional glimmer of hope shone through songs such as 'Children Of The Grave' and 'Sabbra Cadabra', Sabbath’s response to this world gone wrong was typically disengagement ('Sweet Leaf', 'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Hole In The Sky') or outright disgust ('War Pigs', 'Killing Yourself To Live', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'). This uniquely slothful brand of misanthropic angst runs like a stagnant river through the six albums spanning the period 1970 to 1975.
'Black Sabbath', 'Paranoid', 'Master Of Reality', 'Volume 4', 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' and 'Sabotage' are considered by the majority of Sabbath devotees to represent the real Black Sabbath, and rightly so. Over the course of these albums the band redefined what it meant to be ‘heavy’. Previously this was a vague term employed by hippies to describe anything meaningful or intense. In this sense, ‘Heavy’ might encompass anything from Pink Floyd and Yes to Traffic and The Grateful Dead. But Black Sabbath made music that was devastatingly heavy in form, content, execution and effect. The churning guitars and piledriving rhythms were more powerful and focused than anything else rock ‘n’ roll had to offer at that point and the utter despair of the lyrics contrasted sharply with the tales of topographic oceans favoured by the flouncy art-rockers of the time. Although the debut album constituted a formidable opening statement, their metallic sound would become fully realised on 'Paranoid', released later that same year. Extended instrumental jamming gave way to tighter songs written around slow, repetitive riffing and simple melodies. 'Iron Man', 'Hand Of Doom' and 'Electric Funeral' further refined the proto-doom of the previous album’s title track, reigning in the band’s excesses yet maximising their apocalyptic heaviness.
1971 saw the release of the third Sabbath album, 'Master of Reality'. Often considered the definitive blueprint for all doom metal, it’s also the band’s most consistent collection of songs. What self-respecting doomhead could argue with the descending stoner-riff of 'Sweet Leaf', the galloping charge of 'Children Of The Grave', the demiurgic belch of 'Lord Of This World' or the intergalactic trawl of 'Into The Void'? Tony Iommi has since expressed reservations regarding the album’s production, but in truth Master Of Reality sounds utterly astonishing to this day, a thick, muddy quagmire of majestically dragging riffs, head-smacking rhythms and unhinged prophet-of-doom vocals. Perhaps one of the reasons it sounds still sounds so contemporary is that it has been so ruthlessly plundered by countless doom metal bands, most of whom could only dream of achieving similar levels of cosmic melancholy.
1972’s ‘Volume 4’, though worshipped by many, seems something of a retreat from the troglodytic momentum of the previous record. Hints of jazz, blues and boogie creep in here and there, recalling the syncopated swing of the Earth years. That said, the tracks in which these influences are most conspicuous -'Tomorrow’s Dream', 'Supernaut', 'St. Vitus’ Dance' - are awesome pieces of music featuring some brilliantly infectious riffing from Iommi. The doom element of Volume 4 is provided by 'Snowblind', 'Wheels Of Confusion', 'Cornucopia' and 'Under The Sun', tales of pain, insanity and drug abuse set to riffs of ludicrous weight and girth.
Perhaps understandably, having sold doomloads of records, toured the world and gained access to ever more sophisticated recording facilities, Tony Iommi felt the urge to branch out. This desire may also have been inspired by the fact that with the exception of US legend Lester Bangs and a few others, rock critics hated the band, viewing them as somewhat retarded in comparison to the more cerebral likes of Yes and King Crimson. Hence 1973’s 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' saw the introduction of mellotrons, moogs and orchestras in an effort to expand the band’s musical horizons. It worked. If there was ever a metallic equivalent to the ornate 60s pop of late-period Beatles and Beach Boys, this was it. Not only that, but Sabbath had managed to retain their crucial heaviness. The title track, 'A National Acrobat' and 'Killing Yourself To Live' are key doom texts, the latter featuring the single most depressing lyric of Sabbath’s career (“Just take a look around and what do you see/Pain suffering and misery/It’s not the way that the world was meant/It’s a pity you don’t understand”). Curiously enough, the album’s most audacious experiment was written by Ozzy. The slow, grinding tempo and insistent riff of 'Who Are You' were nothing new but the substitution of moogs for guitars was an unexpected stroke of genius, predating the synth-based space-doom of Italian mentalists Ufommamut by over 30 years.
1975’s Sabotage continued in this experimental-yet-brutal vein, with Iommi piling on the synths and keyboards and even embellishing the industrial-strength riff of 'Supertzar' with a Russian choir. But there were also a couple of future doom standards amongst the kitchen-sink excess. The rabid retreatism of 'Hole In The Sky' would inspire a deranged cover by North Carolina eccentrics Confessor in 1992, while the bruising opening riff of 'Megalomania' harked back to the primal sludge of the ‘Paranoid’ album. Though not strictly doomish - in fact more reminiscent of The Who at their most symphonic and progressive - the stately pace and skull-crushing heaviosity of closing epic 'The Writ' illustrated that Iommi’s growing eclecticism did not necessarily entail any loss of power.
Sadly this wasn’t the case with Sabbath’s final two albums with Ozzy, 1976’s 'Technical Ecstasy' and 1978’s 'Never Say Die', records seldom referenced by anyone, let alone doom metallers. Although both deserving of critical reappraisal if only for their frequently mind-buggering strangeness (Funk? Horn sections? Bill Ward singing?) these records were the sound of the Black Sabbath’s original line-up unspooling. On Technical Ecstasy, the opening riff of 'You Won’t Change Me' carried all the dread and foreboding of earlier works, and 'Dirty Women' would become a staple of their live set upon reuniting in 1997, but these were isolated links to a glorious past. Similarly, 'Never Say Die' would have been a great rock album by any other band, but it completely lacked the combination of punkish aggression and skin-crawling atmosphere which had made the earlier albums so enthralling. Before long Ozzy was out and the nightmare was over. For a while, at least.
As with most influential groups, there was more to Black Sabbath than just the music. Doom metal’s visual aesthetic - skulls, crucifixes, religious iconography and gothic imagery - also owes a great deal to the band’s gloriously morbid image, masterminded by Geezer Butler. The band had been labouring under various names including Polka Tulk Blues Band and Earth until, as legend has it, Geezer clocked the title of a Mario Bava film and suggested a name and image change to his bandmates. His contention was that people paid good money to be scared shitless by horror films, so why not apply the same logic to rock ‘n’ roll? This idea was not entirely without precedent - Screaming Lord Sutch and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins spring to mind - but the embryonic Black Sabbath embraced the grand guignol aspect in a much more substantial manner, dressing in black, posing with skulls for publicity photographs, playing songs with occult themes and cultivating an atmosphere of darkness that established doom metal’s ongoing flirtation with all things morose and macabre.
Despite the fact that many Sabbath songs explore the character of Satan and deal with themes of death, madness and torment, lyrically, Sabbath were far from 100% evil. The sentiments expressed in songs such as 'After Forever' and 'Lord Of This World' are entirely consistent with Christian philosophy, and may even sound a little preachy to modern ears. It's therefore no coincidence that doom metal is similarly preoccupied with sin, repentance, redemption and damnation, as the works of Candlemass, Pentagram, Cathedral and Trouble illustrate. Pentagram's 'All Your Sins' is an almost parodically pious warning of the bad shit to come if one refuses to repent ("You're gonna BURN now!"), the early work of Christian doomheads Trouble is awash with titles such as 'Psalm 9' and 'The Tempter' and Candlemass even attempted their own account of the Old Testament with 1989's 'Tales Of Creation while vocalist Messiah Marcolin pranced around in a monk’s habit. Fear of God and Devil form an important ingredient of the doom worldview. Whereas death and black metal often concern themselves with the pros and cons of antisocial behaviour such as mutilation and church-burning, doom is more concerned with the relentless torment of existence and the terrible punishment that awaits at its end if you fail to bear the weight of wordly misery with good grace. Doom is therefore a deeply moral strain of metal. As Sunn 0)))’s Stephen O’Malley points out, the word ‘doom’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘dom’, meaning judgement or law, referring to an unavoidable fate. Or, more specifically, punishment from God.
Black Sabbath's early work is permanently enshrined in metal legend. But can any of Sabbath’s later albums be said to have had any influence on the development of doom? Most attempts fill Ozzy’s platforms have drawn sniffs of derision, especially on albums where Iommi is the only link to the classic line-up. But while the Dio era receives recognition for such doom-defining artefacts as 'Children Of The Sea' and 'The Sign Of The Southern Cross', there are also occasional echoes of former glories in Sabbath’s post-Dio, pre-reunion wilderness years. 'Zero The Hero' (from 1983’s 'Born Again') is perhaps the finest example of this, featuring two of Iommi’s finest, most cataclysmically evil doom-riffs, as well as a crazed performance from Ian Gillan. The Glenn Hughes era is perhaps best ignored ('No Stranger To Love'? No thanks) but skipping ahead to 1994's 'Cross Purposes' we find the dejected dirge of 'Virtual Death'. The single most impressive product of the Tony Martin-fronted era, this eerie crawl sticks out like a severed digit amongst the disappointingly uptempo numbers that characterise the rest of the record.
Jumping back a couple of years, 1992’s 'Dehumanizer' is possibly the most overlooked entry in the entire Sabbath canon. This ultimately failed attempt at a reconciliation with Ronnie James Dio is notable for being the most doom-laden album the band had released since the Ozzy era. 'After All (The Dead)', 'Letters From Earth' and 'Computer God' all boast monstrous riffing and Dio singing in a more aggressive style than usual, even letting loose a couple of Ozzyisms now and then (check his “Allll-riiight!” on 'Letters From Earth'). However unsatisfactory for the singer, the experience seemed to provide his solo career with a much needed shot of adrenalin. Dio’s subsequent 'Strange Highways' and 'Angry Machines' albums were to be the heaviest - and doomiest - of his career.
Instances of latterday greatness aside, it cannot be denied that the fundamentals of doom metal were established by those first six albums and the dark magic created by Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward. Better musicians may have passed through the ranks, but the chemistry between those four stoned and angry young men from Aston has never been equalled. Are Black Sabbath the spiral architects of doom metal? Without a doubt.
