Black Sabbath - Paranoid Vinyl LP Record | Classic Heavy Metal Album | Perfect for Music Collectors & Rock Fans

Black Sabbath's second album, 1970's Paranoid, was not only the band's most popular record it also stands as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time. Paranoid refined Black Sabbath's signature sound - crushingly loud, minor-key dirges loosely based on heavy blues-rock - and applied it to a newly consistent set of songs with utterly memorable riffs, most of which now rank as all-time metal classics.

The subject matter is unrelentingly, obsessively dark, covering both supernatural/sci-fi horrors and the real-life traumas of death, war, nuclear annihilation, mental illness, drug hallucinations, and narcotic abuse. Yet Sabbath make it totally convincing, thanks to the crawling, muddled bleakness and bad-trip depression evoked so frighteningly well by their music.

Even the qualities that made critics deplore the album (and the group) for years increase the overall effect - the technical simplicity of Ozzy Osbourne's vocals and Tony Iommi's lead guitar vocabulary, the spots when the lyrics sink into melodrama or awkwardness, the lack of subtlety, and the infrequent dynamic contrast. Everything adds up to more than the sum of its parts, as though the anxieties behind the music simply demanded that the band achieve catharsis by steamrolling everything in their path, including their own limitations.

Monolithic and primally powerful, Paranoid defined the sound and style of heavy metal more than any other record in rock history. (AMG)

Vinyl, LP, Reissue, Gatefold, 180 Gram

Tracklist:
A1 War Pigs
A2 Paranoid
A3 Planet Caravan
A4 Iron Man
B1 Electric Funeral
B2 Hand Of Doom
B3 Rat Salad
B4 Fairies Wear Boots