‘Vol 4.’: The Black Sabbath album Ozzy Osbourne called the “best-ever”
Was there ever a point in Black Sabbath where Tony Iommi wasn’t at 100% capacity? There might have been a handful of songs throughout their history that didn’t hit the mark, but even on the albums that are considered complete trash by the fanbase, Iommi is still killing it throughout every single track. And while the wheels may have been falling off during the Ozzy Osbourne era, even ‘The Prince of Darkness’ knew they could make their best music out of nightmarish conditions.
Then again, the beauty of Sabbath’s work was that a lot of it didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles behind it. They probably weren’t expecting to get on the radio next to The Doors and Jimi Hendrix when they got the ball rolling on their debut album, but listening to them cutting loose in the studio on their doomy riffs was enough to satisfy the kids who needed something heavier than the dark psychedelic vibe of San Francisco.
And once the band ended up with their bluesy sound on Paranoid, they probably didn’t realise that they were inventing heavy metal underneath their feet. The title track and ‘Iron Man’ were already major hits with hardcore fans, but even when they invented stoner rock on Master of Reality, tracks like ‘Sweet Leaf’ and ‘Children of the Grave’ had the kind of riffs that felt like listening to Led Zeppelin if Jimmy Page wasn’t simply flirting with the idea of being Satanic.
But they didn’t become the forebearers of stoner rock by accident. The group were already getting baked throughout the recording of their third outing, but once they got back into the studio for Vol 4, they had replaced their reefers with enough cocaine to fill up Tony Montana’s desk a few times over.
While there’s nothing unusual about a rock and roll band using drugs for inspiration, this was the first time that Sabbath started to be less subtle about it. ‘Snowblind’ was already about their fondness for ‘booger sugar’, and while it’s easy to play coy when talking about the song’s meaning, the band did end up thanking the ‘Coke-Cola company’ in the liner notes of the album.
Even if the band were blitzed out of their minds during the recording, Osbourne still maintained that it was among the finest records they had ever made, saying, “Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums – although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ‘cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy. We didn’t argue.”
Despite becoming known as the de facto heavy metal band, this is one of the most experimental albums of Sabbath’s early days. They had already begun tuning down their guitars, but bringing in the piano on ‘Changes’ and making a few funkier tunes like ‘Supernaut’ helped put them in the same league as bands like Zeppelin.
There was still a lot of ground to cover with the Osbourne lineup, but after being treated like the nadir of hard rock, Vol 4 was the first clue that they could go off in different directions. They had been treated like the red-headed stepchild of rock and roll, but after years of playing bluesy heavy metal, they had started to stretch their muscles and see what else was out there.
