Black Sabbath - Volume 4

The next time someone asks you (as often happens these days) just what this beast called Heavy Metal used to be, hand them a copy of this.

Although we're currently being swamped by legions of large trousered Americans sporting goatees and angst, nobody does Metal quite like the British. And if one band can claim to have laid the blueprint for this much maligned genre, it's Black Sabbath. Maybe it's something about Birmingham, but there are few bands who sound so monumentally, well, pissed off.

Volume 4 is widely held to be the point at which the original line-up of Black Sabbath began to lose the plot. They had spent most of the early 70s on a punishing tour schedule, and the drug habits of the various members were becoming the stuff of legend. Recording the album in a rented Bel Air mansion in LA, with a constant supply of cocaine, groupies and booze, didn't help. The album was originally going to be titled Snowblind (for obvious reasons), but record company pressure resulted in the more prosaic moniker. That said, the spirit of Columbia's famous export is rife in the grooves, with a sleeve credit for the 'Great Coke Cola company of Los Angeles.'

Despite (or perhaps because of) this chemically fuelled excess, Volume 4 stands up as one of Sabbath's most musically cohesive albums. Tony Iommi contributes his usual quota of demonic riffs, notably on the thunderous Supernaut and Under the Sun, the latter featuring a fine example of his dropped tuning style. Geezer Butler's bass rumbles at industrial volume alongside Bill Ward's jazz inflected drumming, while above it all wails Ozzy Osbourne with trademark depravity. Elsewhere Iommi was keen to explore lighter textures, such as on the piano led ballad Changes and the acoustic instrumental Laguna Sunrise.

If you feel like an uplifting listen, don't put on Volume 4. If, however, you feel like tasting something of the dark side, coated in the kind of music which could whither James Taylor's eyebrows at fifty paces, you can't do better than this.