Black Sabbath- Paranoid (1970)

It's extraordinary, looking back, how Sabbath could have released this second album so soon after the first. I suppose it was an era where rock band worked, toured and wrote much more quiickly. Killing themselves to live, so to speak.

Paranoid is, of course, brilliant. It must surely be the band's most well-known and popular album and, in "War Pigs", "Iron Man" and the titular track, contains some of the band's most iconic songs. Yet there's zero filler here- even deep cuts such as "Hand of Doom" are magnificent. 

There's still a similarity in style from the album's predecessor with the band's signature heavy riffs that evoke unease and horror. Yet this album branches off into different directions and is less dependent on this feel. There's a variation of styles in thos collection of songs, with the band's signature longer track with their superb transitions, but also shorter songs. Bill Ward's jazz sensibilities are allowed freer rein, lot least with his far from pretentious drum solo in "Rat Salad". The band are, by this point, fully formed- heavy, with their own sound, but announcing that they are by no means limiting themselves and reserve the right to explore.

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 this very revealing debut album after several years, and finding new stuff in it. It's still at once a soundscape 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 song 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.

Black Sabbath (1963)

 "I do hope you haven't come alone..."

What is this that stands before me? Figure in black that points at me? Well, no, it's Mario Bava's most famous film, a highlight of Boris Karloff's career and, of course, famously seen at the cinema by one Geezer Butler.

It's also an extraordinarily shot film, wit studio and location made to look creepily effective by means of camera framing, movement and a thoughtful deployment of a colour palette based around magenta and green. This is a film that plays around, and has fun with, the concept of what is a horror B movie and what is a more serious film, and deliberately blurs the distinction. It's a portmanteau film based on short stories by such names as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Maupassant, yet the script cheerfully diverges from the source material in the pursuit of the grand guignol, artistically depicted.

The three tales are each very different, with effective twists, but all have in common the very effective use of tension- as well as the use of the camera to make elements that may look cheap or ineffective in the hands of a lesser director look terrifying. The first tale has overtones of male violence against women, yet is told from a female perspective (and gaze), while the second tale, with Karloff truly oustanding, is a clever take on the vampire myth, moving it to a creepy rutal Russia of Czernobog gloom. The third tale may be the slightest, but it perfectly illustrates how much Bava can do, even with relatively basic material, to wring the maximum amount of effectively paced and creepily shot horror out of whatever he's given with.

An impressive film but although, yes, Karloff is ecelent, essentially this is an example of a film raised from the ordinary to the extraordinary by superb direction. Bava is magnificent.