The Black Sabbath album Ozzy Osbourne said “isn’t that good”
Black Sabbath were never meant to be the critical darlings when they brought their musical doom into the world.
The whole world had still been riding the high of Flower Power, so hearing Ozzy Osbourne sing about the darkness in the world felt like a hit of bad acid once their debut album found its way onto the charts. But even for as wild as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ could get in his prime, he could always acknowledge when a handful of their records didn’t match up to the rest.
Then again, a lot of what critics hated Sabbath for is the exact reason why they should be so beloved. They were never meant to fit into a neat box, and while a lot of their songs were nowhere near traditional single length, it was a nice alternative hearing someone sing about pain rather than getting songs about creating musical utopia every single time you turned on the radio.
Sabbath weren’t coming from that kind of upbringing, and once they had a few albums under their belt, songs like ‘Iron Man’ set the template for heavy metal. But even if they classified themselves as a hard rock band, there were always bound to be bold new places to go once they started to take over the studio a little more.
After all, the first two albums were made on a shoestring budget half the time, and when they finally hit on Master of Reality, they had far more wiggle room when it came to their tunes. ‘Sweet Leaf’ is still one of the nastiest blues licks that Tony Iommi ever came up with, and ‘Into the Void’ was the first time that the band’s bluesy sound started to morph into the sounds that people like Metallica would use later. So why was Osbourne so down on the record?
Make no mistake, the album is far from perfect, but Osbourne felt at the time that they had missed the mark when making it, saying, “Master of Reality was just, personally I was a bit disappointed with it. It was a rush job. We had to write as quick as we could and record it even faster. Luckily it isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Compared to the standard of the new one isn’t quite that good, though. [It] was very messy. We recorded it in a week. It was out in about three weeks. It’s funny too, that has been our biggest selling record. I really don’t know why.”
That might make a lot more sense coming off of the strange experiments on Vol. 4, but they wouldn’t have got to that point without getting Master of Reality right. They had only flirted with ballads a few times, and while ‘Changes’ is one of the finest vocal performances that Osbourne ever released, it feels too overdone compared to the more plaintive approach that he took on ‘Solitude’.
And with Iommi detuning his guitar for the first time on Master, the world was wide open for other guitarists to do the same. The album also is the most well-balanced of the Osbourne era, always featuring a break in the action like ‘Orchid’ to come down from the massive riffs on ‘Children of the Grave’.
But if there’s one thing that puts Master of Reality above everything else in Sabbath’s catalogue, it’s the legacy it left behind. Not every song is necessarily the best from a sonic perspective, and their more mainstream songs aren’t on here, but it’s easy to draw a straight line that connects this record to the beginnings of thrash metal, stoner rock, doom metal and everything else in between.
