The Sabs are back with a super dark and sludgy album, Tony Iommi taking on production duties as well as lead guitar (you can pronounce that either way, "lead" as in the one at the front, or as "lead" as in the metal, either works in this case).
The evolution of heavy metal continues here – the opening track Wheels of Confusion features a double-time riff that must be one of the earliest headbanging tunes, while tracks such as Snowfall and Cornucopia are sheer dark thudding glory. The final track, Under The Sun, leads into a gloom-ridden descending chord sequence from Geezer Butler on heavily distorted bass with Iommi giving it some emotional guitar over the top.
There are a couple of oddities. The piano driven Changes, about a failing relationship, is the Obligatory Ballad that metal bands ended up feeling the need to include (see also Wind Of Change by The Scorpions or More Than Words by Extreme); it doesn’t really fit, whereas the surprise Spanish acoustic guitar of Laguna Sunrise is better. The track FX is a short sequence of reverb-adjusted noises where the group dropped various objects on the strings of Iommi’s guitar – the kind of hyper-focus and fascination with inane things that drugs can bring you.
Talking of which, this album is infamous for the prodigious quantities of cocaine consumed during its production, to the extent that it was a wonder that it was ever completed, and also that the band members survived. Bill Hicks had a routine about how musicians shouldn’t be against drugs because all the best music was made under the influence (from his Relentless tour ca. 1992) but much as I love Bill, there’s got to be at least a bell curve going on here, otherwise you end up with Brian Jones passing out in the middle of recording, Skip Spence chasing his bandmates with an axe, or Tony Iommi collapsing on stage.
This is the kind of music that industrial machinery would make, and it kind of is indirectly, thanks to the machinery that cut the tips off some of Iommi’s fingers and led to his particular down-tuned playing style. It's not their best album, I think, not matching the songwriting clarity of Paranoid, but if you want something dark and heavy, you can't go too far wrong with this one.
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