No great sin given it’s 50 years old, but even by 1970 standards the mix is pretty unexplosive. For all its craft the album does feel awfully rusty. Spells in tracks like “Planet Caravan” and “Hand of Doom”, where the band stretch out and have a good brood, are welcome reprieves. Despite the album’s fairly modest 42-minute runtime it does start to flag before the end. Paranoid is relentless, almost to a fault. “Iron Man” is the flagbearer in that sense, its riff and rhythm grinding forward while Ozzy Osbourne delivers one of the nerdiest rock epics I’ve ever heard. Every track is a meticulously planned and emphatically delivered metal music extravaganza. It’s not as flashy as newer products on the market, but the quality of the craftsmanship is beyond question. It’s built to last music a cast iron album with a thin coating of rust. After decades in some field somewhere the nuts and bolts of the things still work. The items that features in these videos – vices, mining lamps, lighters, things like that – are often dated and clunky, but boy are they well made. Old gizmos are dug out, treated for rust, and painted to look like new. It defined much of what was to come, and for that we should be tremendously thankful.Ī type of YouTube channel has really taken off over the last few years in which they restore things.
Overall, I still find it to be one of the most gripping records of its kind. I suppose there’s only so far you can go with melodramatic lyrics and protracted solos of the minor-key, and I suspect my criticisms of the record is as much to do with heavy metal as a whole.
Inside of Paranoid you hear shades of what was to come from Metallica and Nirvana, and its success was partly responsible for an entire musical culture. This much is widely well-accepted, as it’s often cited as one of the most influential metal albums ever made. It’s really no surprise that the outlandishly inventive hip-hop star Danny Brown uses this introduction as his walk-on music. The former of those opening up with a robotic vocal effect that still incites the sweetest hilarity. “Iron Man”, “War Pigs” and of course “Paranoid” still stand as some of the most thrilling metal songs ever recorded. Whilst the mixing shows signs of age, the songwriting, dynamism and instrumental finesse certainly does not. This year we celebrate Paranoid‘s 50th anniversary, which is quite an astonishing feat. As far as straight up heavy metal goes, I think Black Sabbath’s Paranoid is one of the very best. My favourite records within the genre are those that come within sub-categories that emerged in the ’90s and beyond: the likes of The Downward Spiral* (industrial metal), Toxicity (nu-metal), and Dissociation (mathcore) to name but a few. Often absurd, sometimes comical, and, every now and then, rather spectacular. It was funny 50 years ago, and it’s funny now.
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