Lester Bangs is one of the most esteemed rock writers in history, but even he didn’t quite get Black Sabbath when he heard their first record back in 1970.
“Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England’s answer to Coven. Well, they’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck – despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master’s tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse.” -Lester Bangs
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Second take: Five Stars (2004 Rolling Stone Album Guide)
“They took the blues out of blues-rock and replaced it with Wagner, creating epic battle rhythms filled with a tension and release that any adolescent boy would know about firsthand. Thanks to Rodger Bain’s production, Black Sabbath sounds really big and really unhealthy. It’s an album that eats hippies for breakfast; also, it has even been statistically determined that if a brain cell were the size of a grain of sand, the amount lost while listening to this record upon its first year of release could easily fill the Grand Canyon. What people forget about Black Sabbath – and it’s understandable given their demonic imagery and All Hallow’s Eve vibe – was that it was one of the most God-driven, puritanical, wet-blanket rock bands in history. Its ‘mankind is evil and must repent for its wicked ways’ thesis would influence almost all the future bards of the metallic arts.” -Scott Seward.
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