Slayer

If you’re ever desperate for a concentrated hit of anti-fun, I recommend you attend a photoshoot with Californian metal legends Slayer. Today, we’re down a grubby, piss-stained London alley watching four stern, mirthless men in their forties lean against a black metal gate. Plan B photographer Cat Stevens is attempting to get them to loosen up and act natural, but I honestly don’t think they know how. “Do you guys talk to each other?” she jibes. “Ever?” Cue a ripple of subdued laughter, spiked with a subtle pang of discomfort. She hit a nerve there.

“I put our longevity down to compromise,” confides Tom Araya (bass, vocals and greying beard). “And in all honesty, I think I’m the one who’s been doing the compromising. This could have been through a long time ago. It’d be really easy to break this band up. People ask me, ‘How have you managed to stay together for so long?’ It’s because I’ve allowed it.” Guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King are men of considerable girth, if you take my meaning. They wear sunglasses all the fuckin’ time, even in their luxurious but actually rather drab and dispiriting hotel rooms. Together, they stride around like the finalists in a Big Bad Wolf contest. Araya and drummer Dave Lombardo are impeccably polite and cheerful. That is, when they’re not around Hanneman and King.

“Another thing,” adds Araya, “is that you’re bound by obligations. You have contracts. At the beginning it wasn’t like that. But now everything is paper and signature. ‘This says here that I own you. Until you’ve met your commitments, you’re stuck with me.’ So, you learn to avoid all that rather than shoot yourself in the foot and have people start telling you, ‘It’s your fault this is all going to hell – you gotta pay!’

“But,” he sighs. “I really believe in this band. That’s the biggest part. I believe in the music we create.”

“I live it every day/Don’t know another way” – ‘Catalyst’

Slayer’s new album Christ Illusion is being hailed as a ‘return to form’ for the band. Those transmitting this particular meme may have missed 2001’s utterly savage God Hates Us All, but more about that later. In any case, Christ Illusion isn’t a return to form, nor is it a case of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ laziness, as suggested when it was reviewed in September’s Plan B. Listen to the ouevre from 1983’s Show No Mercy onward and two things become evident. First, Slayer never lost their form. Second, no two Slayer albums sound alike: the AC/DC of thrash they ain’t. Christ Illusion represents yet another shift in the band’s sound, being blunter and more claustrophobic than any of its predecessors. Everything sounds a little too close for comfort, a little too real. If, as Plan B’s George Taylor states, “The real magic has left the stage”, then it’s perfectly consistent with where Slayer are right now. In 2006, they have no use for magic. No time for illusion. No mercy.

Constant throughout all this mutation has been the furious howl of vocalist and bassist Tom Araya. Much of the attention devoted to Slayer has concentrated on King and Hanneman’s riffs and their wayward, almost harmolodic soloing, or Lombardo’s formidable drumming. But Araya’s vocals are an indispensible element of Slayer’s sound, hidden in plain view, yet immediately recognisable and distinct from the generic ‘cookie monster’ style that predominates in the world of extreme metal.

“When I go back and listen to Show No Mercy, Haunting The Chapel and Hell Awaits,, you can hear that I’m trying to sound really angry and aggressive,” Araya smiles. “But on Reign In Blood, I started singing differently. It just came naturally. I guess it became very distinctive. I’m amazed I was able to sing the way I sang on those first three records, because singing that way can really fuck up your voice. Maybe in the studio I was doing that, but when I sang the songs live, I was belting them. So when people say, ‘You’re a singer!’ I say, ‘No, I’m more the screamer in the band. I scream in key’.”

He’s also a consummate character actor, inhabiting each lyrical role with genuine conviction. Songs concerning serial murderers are a staple of metal, but few are invested with the humanity and empathy Araya brings to ‘Dead Skin Mask’ (an ode to Ed Gein) or ‘213’ (a tribute to Jeffrey Dahmer). On putrescently psychedelic numbers such as ‘Seasons In The Abyss’, ‘Bloodline’ and their cover of Iron Butterfly’s ‘Inna Gadda Da Vida’ it is Araya that brings the weirdness, his multitracked vocal lines slipping and sliding over King and Hanneman’s riffs with queasy lubriciousness. Lombardo graciously acknowledges Araya’s contribution to the band’s rhythmic impact.

“When Tom sings,” remarks the drummer, “the guitars become just a floating sound. It’s not something that I follow. But there’s something between me and him, the vocals and the drums, that sets this pulse. It’s amazing. I heard a recent live recording, it was one of the slower ones like ‘South Of Heaven’ or ‘Dead Skin Mask’ and man, we were just dead on! Tom’s vocals were locking into the drums and it grooved so well, I was just blown away. I kept playing it over and over again, telling my kids, ‘Listen to that! Listen to that! Listen how he locks into the drums!’ Everything else didn’t matter. What mattered was the vocals, and the beat.”

Dave Lombardo rejoined Slayer in 2001 after a nine-year absence, but Christ Illusion is the first album to feature his unmistakable double-kick work since 1990’s Seasons In The Abyss. During his time away from the band he established himself as one of the world’s leading avant-rock drummers, working with John Zorn, Mike Patton and DJ Spooky. While his replacement Paul Bostaph did a fine job of keeping the heartbeat of Slayer speeding into the (blood) red, Lombardo brings a non-metal dexterity and suppleness to their music, incorporating the exploratory zeal of the dedicated improviser. “I always wing it,” he nods. “I make it up as I go along and even live, I try to add a little bit more. Because I’ve learned the songs so well, it’s like, ‘Wow, I should have done this in the recording session!’ But I can never go back. It’s an increased courage. I’m more positive and more confident about what I’m doing now. It’s good to be back.”

Lombardo’s stupefying, rapid-fire battery was instrumental in making 1986’s Reign In Blood a serious contender for the title of The Greatest Metal Album Ever Recorded. Around 28 minutes of concise brutality and relentless morbidity, Reign In Blood is the album most owned by people who only own one Slayer album. And perhaps rightly so.

But while Reign’s place in the canon is secure, I’d argue for God Hates Us All as Slayer’s greatest achievement on their own terms. A grand dramatisation of Kerry King’s bitter disgust at everything, God Hates Us All essays alienation on a galactic scale. It’s a sonic invocation of the secret part of us that identifies with the suicide bomber, the serial killer, the extremist…The part of us that wishes the whole world would just fuckin’ burn, because that’s all we deserve. We’re all complicit in the endless cycle of human misery, whether through inaction, malice or plain human weakness. It doesn’t matter. We’re all the same. Guilty as fuck.

“I hate everyone equally…just me in my world of enemies” – ‘Disciple’

It isn’t solely a case of Slayer – or Kerry King – versus the world. The band’s rage is equally capable of turning in on itself. But while the internal conflicts experienced by contemporaries such as Metallica and Megadeth have resulted in dismembered lineups, substandard music, or both, Slayer are peculiar in that the antagonism that lies just beneath the surface seems not only to fuel the band’s creativity but also ensure their continued survival. During our interview, Tom Araya implies that his unhappiness with King and Hanneman’s tight grip on the songwriting credits almost led to his departure. However he claims to have learned how to use this dissatisfaction as a motivational tool. It sounds debilitating in theory, but check the guy’s track record – it works.

“I have to find an outlet for it,” chuckles Araya. “And it seems to work well for me. It’s that constant drip of oil, fuelling the fire.”

There’s no better indication of negativity fostering creativity than ‘Supremist’, the last song on Christ Illusion. It’s a damn near perfect illustration of why Slayer are still a vital creative force after 20-odd years. ‘Supremist’ is a musical scourge, a purge, a holocaust. Sure, you’ve heard that before. But this song is genuinely horrifying, more so than anything death metal or grindcore has to offer and on a par with the rampant nihilism of Norway’s black metal elite, minus the cartoonish Satanic posturing. Beginning as a waspish hardcore speed-fest, the song warps through various riffacious permutations until it bursts into the final movement, at which point everything just goes off. Tom – frenzied yet excruciatingly human – intones, “Must maintain control of the weak/Must contain the minds of the free”, while Kerry and Jeff lay down an electric hellscape somewhere between classic Celtic Frost, Godflesh and early Swans. Shards of feedback descend like fire from heaven and guitar strings whine like the human spirit crushed under the yoke of tyranny.

I tell Tom that this is the most chilling song on the album, and add that its effect is less to do with velocity or heaviness, but the creation of an atmosphere that is uniquely Slayer-ish.

“When you hear a riff, it’s not a question of whether it sounds like it should be a Slayer riff or whatever,” he agrees. “It’s about creating an atmosphere. It’s got nothing to do with speed, it’s got nothing to do with the cookie monster voice. It’s got everything to do with the mood that you’re creating.”

That old chestnut from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four about a boot stamping on a human face, forever…Well, it’s been a little overused. But fuck it, it applies here. ‘Supremist’ is a stark vision of humankind’s final subjugation and subsequent extinction. In a world where you might be worried about stepping on a bus, train or plane for fear of being blown to bits by homemade explosives, or about the increasingly stubborn weirdness of American foreign policy, or about the stifling climate of fear that we’ve been plunged into over the last few years, this is potent, relevant stuff.

Meanwhile, the rictus grin ‘culture of the monoform’ as described by filmmaker Peter Watkins (Punishment Park, The War Game, The Gladiators) grows ever more firmly entrenched. As the world collapses around our ears, we’re encouraged to keep smiling, keep fucking, keep shopping. Yet also to be afraid. Very afraid. It’s a mad world, for sure. And if any band articulates that madness more accurately than Slayer, I’ve yet to hear them.

Municipal Waste

"We love partying, we're very serious about that,” affirms Ryan Waste, guitarist/vocalist/hairy hottie with Richmond, Virginia thrash reanimators Municipal Waste. “We're serious about the music, man. And we're serious about the paycheque, hahaha! We're serious about fun. How about that?"
Municipal Waste are perhaps the third or fourth best thing to death in terms of escaping the sickening realities of life and embracing chaos. For all its communal nature, partying is a form of denial, inevitably so, because what is there to party about really when one takes in the constant bomb threat modern life has become? Partying is about denying reality you’ve been handed and creating your own, a responsibility-free zone. Selfish? You bet. It isn’t party for your right to fight, as Public Enemy once detourned their labelmates, The Beastie Boys. It’s party for your right to party. Harder than ever. Til it hurts.
So as the world gets shittier, the grimily hedonistic hi-energy buzz of thrash metal is understandably enjoying a criticial and commercial resurgence. The surprise about this revival is that it seems to be throwing up a few bands who sound vital and venomous enough to survive the fickle attentions of the music media (ourselves included). Nottingham’s Earache have smartly bagged three prime movers; Huddersfield’s Evile, Merseyside’s awesome SSS and the big bros of them all, Municipal Waste. The latter’s three full-length albums to date, Waste ‘Em All (2003), Hazardous Mutation (2005) and the new The Art Of Partying may bring to mind the spotty, split-ended Metallica that recorded Kill ‘Em All, the DRI that unleashed Dealing With It and Crossover and especially the Exodus of Bonded By Blood, Pleasures Of The Flesh and Fabulous Disaster, but they hardly sound like a tired, money-minded re-run of something that worked better twenty years ago. And in person, they seem 100 per cent sincere - these dudes shit metal, which is probably uncomfortable, but they seem happy enough, considering.
"I think metal got pushed over the edge,” says vocalist Tony ‘Guardrail’ Foresta, a likeable fellow whose face habitually forms what can only be described as ‘a shit-eating grin’. “Like in the past five to ten years, it got shitty, and then it got shittier, now you got dudes dressed as girls wearing fuckin' make-up playing fuckin' screamy breakdowns, and all these people who grew up listening to Priest and fuckin' Slayer look at it and it's like, 'What is this bullshit?' Y'know?"
"I think a lot of those bands, they write the music and it's just kind of accepted that you write lyrics about violence and dark imagery,” states bassist/vocalist Philip ‘LandPHIL’ Hall. “They're just like, 'Ok, whatever...' and just pump out a bunch of lyrics. It's just kind of accepted if you have a death metal band then you write about gore, y'know? So they're just like, 'Alright, we'll write about gore...'"
"The funny thing is,” continues Ryan, “when we write about gore, people just laugh at it. Our shit's gory as hell! If you really read the lyrics it's like, 'Damn, that's kind of negative!' But everyone's laughing about it, because we're just having fun with it."
At this point in the interview, I think about what I’ve heard from other music journalists about Municipal Waste. Apparently, some interviewers have found the band hard work, too boorish for their delicate sensibilities, too keen to proselytise on the joys of cheap terror, good beer and nice tits. I can see why some might find all this a little lowbrow for their tastes. But would it be too blunt to suggest they pull the baguette out of their arse and loosen up a little? Let’s look again at that list: cheap terror, good beer, nice tits. Fuckin’ hell. What’s the problem here? Now, beer is righteous (hmm... kinda) but why talk about it when you can drink it? I decide to skip over that and aim straight for the terror and tits. Priorities, right?
So what films inspire the lurid goo-spattered vistas of Municipal Waste tunes?
Tony: "Repo Man."
Ryan: "We sample that on one of our old records. It's a classic."
Have you seen Tarantino and Rodriguez’s ‘Grindhouse’ double feature yet?
Ryan: "I like ‘Planet Terror’, the first half of it. That one smokes the other one.”
Tony: "I like them both. I think the second one, the Tarantino one could have been edited by about 20 minutes."
Ryan: "The dialogue was just annoying. It's a man writing women's dialogue and he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about."
LandPHIL: "Totally."
Ryan: "The first one was just so over the top. If we could make a Waste video that looked like 'Planet Terror'... I mean, the toxic element's there."
LandPHIL: "Lots of green, lots of gore, hot chicks!"
Ryan: "Choice use of cursing like in old '70s movies... 'Shee-it!' Hahaha!"
Dave Witte: “Those dudes are in love with the original ideas, the history. Which is kind of close to what we're doing. Everything has been manipulated and bastardised, but we go to the roots of it. A lot of people don't recognise the start - it gets lost. Then the bands get shitty, people get bombed out. It's all cycles."
Drummer Dave Witte (ex-Discordance Axis/Burnt By The Sun) is vaguely reminiscent of Jeff Bridges’ character The Dude from the Cohen Brothers’ ‘The Big Wachowski’. His manner is similarly laidback yet authoritative, and he clearly commands respect from the rest of the Waste. However his attempt at steering the interview at least part-way towards music is only partly successful.
Ryan: "We wrote a song about ‘The Thing’. 'Blood Hunger' on Waste 'Em All is about 'Blood Diner', a bad movie that I just can't stop watching."
LandPHIL: "'Leprechaun In The Hood'."
Um... what’s that about?
Ryan: "A leprechaun's in the hood and he's hanging out with rappers, he's doing bong hits and he kills someone with a bong, he gets locked in the fridge and he just smokes weed..."
Tony: "They did 'Leprechaun In The Hood' as part five of the ‘Leprechaun’ series and it was so popular that they did a sequel to it... so it's like a sequel of a sequel, hahaha!"
Ryan: "And you forget it's about a leprechaun, man, it's just like a hood movie or a gangster movie. But then it's like, 'Woah, a little leprechaun! And he killed somebody!' Hahahaha!"
Given your collective interest in cinema, what are the chances of a Municipal Waste feature film?
Tony: "I was talking to Ryan about that a little while ago, I said, 'I just think we should write a fuckin' script!' It would be awesome."
Ryan: "We might work with [infamous Troma founder and cheapo filmmaker extraordinaire] Lloyd Kaufman for a video. He's interested."
Tony: "There won't be any CGI in that shit! Hahahaha! 'We got ketchup...' Hahahahaha!"
LandPHIL: "Man, the cornier the better when it comes to special effects and shit. To see Tony, like, rip out his guts, even if it looked bad, it would still be so badass."
Tony: "I'll rip out your guts! Hahahahaha!"
Something at this point - can’t quite recall what - leads me to believe that it would be a good idea to admit that I have repeatedly masturbated to Stuart Gordon’s supremely trashy 1988 Lovecraft adaptation, ‘From Beyond’. Whatever the reason, it does seem to steer the conversation towards tits, as planned. Result!
Tony: “He jerks off to ‘From Beyond’! Hahahaha!”
LandPHIL: “Did you ever masturbate to ‘Basket Case’ too?”
To ‘Basket Case 2’? No. Never seen it.
LandPHIL: “Horror movies were where I saw my first titties as a kid.”
Ryan: “You know it’s good if there are tits in the first or second scene. That’s a horror rule.”
Tony: “Our next video’s gonna have tits. I insisted on it.”
Ryan: “Our last video, there were tits after the shoot.”
Tony: “Yeah, there were.”
LandPHIL: “There are titties on the new album.”
Tony: “They’re gross, hahahaha!”
Ryan: “We poured blood all over them.”
I think I’m growing my own right now. It’s a bit of a worry, really.
Tony: “Hey we’ve been in Europe, man. That beer’s thick, dude! It’s killer.”
LandPHIL: “We saw this band in Australia and all of us were like, ‘Woah!’ This one dude was playing bass and he had the biggest tits I’ve ever seen on a dude. Everybody in the audience was like, ‘Look at the tit meat!’”
Tony: “But he didn’t give a fuck, man, he took off his shirt and he had man tits. Wear the man tits proud. Juggle ‘em out, man! Show ‘em what you can do with those things.”
Thanks, Tony. I will.

Black Sabbath

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.