Slightly downtuned Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the greatest Black Sabbath album of all time

Someone uploaded the entirety of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath on Youtube. I'm thinking it was a vinyl rip and the belt of the turntable or something was adjusted, but whatever happened the whole album is tuned down a half-step (meaning your G's are F#'s, your C's are B's, etc). This slight, unintentional adjustment has given the whole album an extra two tons of heft, making it an even thicker album than Master of Reality. I fucking love it. Here are the links for all eight songs of this rumbling leviathan.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

A National Acrobat

Fluff

Sabbra Cadabra

Killing Yourself To Live

Who Are You

Looking For Today

Spiral Architect

The Who - Young Man Blues

Riff mark: The whole damned thing is a riff

For all those teenage years spent sopping blood from my ear canals with those orange foam headphone earpads, my post-traumatic adolescent viewpoint is that Live At Leeds is the spastic destroyer of all kinetic recorded performances. No bullshit, we’ve got the loudest shredder operating with blades of glorious, un-oiled distortion alongside Deep Purple’s In Rock for 1970, the year metal really started popping its placenta-covered head through a womb made from a few Kinks songs. Perfect timing, The Who achieving untouchable Zen in audiences greater than two or three studio engineers, for this instance the explosives experts just drop their microphones and get the hell out of there. I mean these blokes are really beating the shit out of everything, including themselves. Townshend and Entwistle are deadlocked in a 4^th-dimensional war over whose wounded, blistered fingers can wrap around time the fastest, particularly in those bluesy, free-verse tracks. Moon’s Moon, but worse, given license to pound everything nonsensically in one take, as long as it fits into common time, every measure a fill more than beat. Daltrey’s got the deceptively hardest job: wail and look good at it, the bluest collar barely capable of holding back the triangular avalanche behind him. It’s all a beautiful migraine epidemic, and with all the hoopla of Zep and Sabbath bullying inside the primordial ooze of heavy metal, The Who rightfully lay claim to a percentage of that amorphous, developing mass. Mandatory noise. Original 1970 LP released with a meager six tracks. Reissued in 1995 with a generous 14 rockers, then once again in 2001 with an entire performance of Tommy (personal opinion: it never shined live, or in film, or on Broadway, or anything not studio).    

Riff Re-Do: Nazareth - Please Don't Judas Me

When this blog began I wrote my first few entries in a comedic, mocking style. One of these entries ended up being my most listened to album of 2014. I never truly gave it the literary admiration it deserved, so if you’ll forgive a repeat entry, I’d like that second chance.

Riff mark: 6:01

Man. Can’t throw down anything these Scots do but this single, sad, mourning relic, a frustrated, grey cry in an otherwise underwhelming discography of who-cares. I return to Hair of the Dog like a suicidal church, a weekly confessional of every hard rock gloom and every hard rock I’ve never smoked. Just… real, relatable depression and hurt, and it’s unashamed in crying, naked in front of you, more than any album I’ve known. There’s a violent duality between fight and defeat throughout, spitters like the infectious groove title track and inevitable Sabbath-mate Miss Misery shouting heresies to women like witch trials, while Everly Brothers cover and radio smash Love Hurts and Guilty (unreleased on US editions, worth mentioning) are apologetic palate cleansers post-binging. Dan McCafferty, mouth full of smokes and gravel, pushes air through what little esophageal lining he has in one of the truest exhaustions of human desperation; a fateful precursor to Axl Rose. His back-up gang is unremarkable, but effective. Two throwaways: Changin’ Times (complete rip-off of Black Dog) and bluesy Whiskey Drinkin’ Woman (out of place and boring) to be sacrificed to the pit or the 3-headed bat from the cover for Please Don’t Judas Me, a near 10-minute spaced-out disintegration of aggression, pushing away all sin and negative thought, desperate to swim ashore to land or mantra, away from women, woes, friends, vices. Hard rock pulling its hair (ha ha) from the roots. Maybe that’s why I’m in love with a snapshot of something crying.