Black Sabbath- Black Sabbath (1970)

This may be an old favourite of mine, and hardly exploring new ground, but sod it; I've driven from North Tyneside to southern Leicestershire today, and I'm knackered.

But there's value in going back to thois very revealing debut album after several years, and finding new stuff in it. It's still at once a sounscape and a collection of distint and extraordinary structured songs all at once. Sabbath have always been known for marrying complex transitions between different sections of the sond with an overall coherence, and that's present from the very first, eponymous track, along with the whole damn album. There's the horror, uneasy feel, with the devil's chord and the whiff, as the band have themselves said, of Hammer Horror, very much contemporary.

And yet it's not heavy metal, not that such a thing truly existed in 1969-70. There's a psychedelia feel, and although it's clealy not an album made by hippies it certainly belongs in that context. Except, of course, this is not made by fey middle class aesthetes from Cambridge or California but four very working class lads from Birmingham, a much grimmer place in 1970 than it is now.

This is also clearly an album from before the awful racial segregation of today's mucic indusstry. There's no while "rock and pop" or black "urban". Here we have a rock band which has an extraordinary jazz drummer in Bill Ward who would not be out of place on a soul record, and frequent occasions where the music has, shock horror, a groove. This is an extraordinary album, yes, but very much one of its time.