You’d better hide from the atomic tide
Black Sabbath were named after the 1963 Italian horror anthology by Mario Bava. Hosted by Boris Karloff, it was a horror movie in explosive sixties psychedelic colour, yet rather effective, with a largely modern setting. I like to imagine this is what Black Sabbath were thinking about when they decided to put the neon dude in a helmet running through the woods on the cover.
Paranoid is a phenomenal album, Sabbath at their purest. A heavy fog of doom hangs over everything, as the title refers not just to the song, but the overall mood, a dread sense of foreboding over nuclear annihilation. “Electric Funeral” paints a picture of the world in ruins after this apocalypse, a hard, trudging dirge. “War Pigs” opens the album with that legendary, slow, drowning guitar part and the wail of air raid sirens, then it speeds up and Iommi just goes mad with his shredded finger-nubs, the closing “Luke’s Wall” section of the song is intense. Then, the revved-up, dangerously psychotic child of “Born to Be Wild” – the hopping mad title track, the delirious and mournfully unsettling “Planet Caravan” and of course, Ozzy’s showpiece “Iron Man” as that sharp, shrill voice pulls the song around despite the powerful virtuosity of the rest of the band.
After that, we hit the real dark shit. “Electric Funeral” is, as far as I’m concerned, the Sabbath’s best. Iommi’s guitar part is so heavy it could crush entire nations to sparkling dust. ‘Fading moon falls upon dying world of radiation,’ Ozzy sings in his litany of destruction. Paired with that is their heroin death song “Hand of Doom” about escaping the hellscape of modern America and its political realities. That’s what Paranoid is all about in its dark, twisted way.
96% => *****
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