Sunday, March 18, 2007

244. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (1972)

















Track Listing

1. Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener
2. Tomorrow's Dream
3. Changes
4. FX
5. Supernaut
6. Snowblind
7. Cornucopia
8. Laguna Sunrise
9. St. Vitus Dance
10. Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes

Review

Oh gods... this is supposedly the last Black Sabbath album before they go shit, clearly they are already daubing some manure on themselves by this time. After their amazing first two albums there is a forgetable third and this fourth... well it really isn't that good. There's some more classic Sabbath, yes, some songs could easily have belonged to better albums, but then you get something like Changes and you think, "Why? God! Why?".

The songwriting is still shit, Ozzie has all the writing talent of a consumptive slab of granite on a bike, falling off a cliff. His lyrics are obvious, puerile and just plain stupid... this can of course be offset by some great music! Which in most cases it isn't, sometimes the simple fact of rocking makes it more palatable to listen to badly rhymed lyrics, but even the rock seems to be missing here... Changes again is an example of this, it just doesn't work to have crappy Black Sabath lyrics on a ballad! And then they go and dig it up more recently to make a duet with Kelly Osbourne and Ozzie? What the hell were they thinking? I'd pay to see Kelly do Iron Man or War Pigs or even Paranoid... not Changes, of all crimes against humanity.

So this is definitely the beggining of the slippery slope, it isn't that bad but it doesn't live up to their better work, from here its all the way down... get it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Wheels Of Confusion
2. Snowblind
3. Laguna Sunrise
4. Supernaut

Final Grade


6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

It was originally to be titled Snowblind, the name of a track on the album which was a reference to cocaine use. The record company feared a backlash, particularly in America, so the title was altered. The song "Snowblind" had to be re-recorded because in the original Ozzy yelled the word "cocaine" after each verse (he can still be heard whispering "cocaine" in the final version, and he often screamed "cocaine" during live performances of the song, as he does in their Reunion) live album. In the sleevenotes of the album Black Sabbath gave their thanks to "the great COKE-Cola Company", this being a humoristic and drug-related paraphrase on the Coca Cola-company.

hahaha that so funny!


The History of Balck Sabbath in Viyl covers with Wheels Of Confusion as the soundtrack: