Black Sabbath
Vol 4

THE REVIEW

The Black Sabbath are a band of significant influence in the evolution of hard rock towards metal, I admit it myself, although their style, purely from a musical standpoint, hasn't always fully satisfied me. In fact, the granite riffs from the handicapped guitarist Tony Iommi and the shrill voice of Ozzy Osbourne, along with the rhythm section of Geezer Butler & Bill Ward, gave quite a jolt to the '70s rock scene, introducing the basic coordinates of the metal sound and starting to sketch what would later be defined as doom. After the first three albums, Black Sabbath, Paranoid and Master of Reality, the best of the Ozzy era, the musical proposal of Black Sabbath began to saturate: consequently, Iommi, fascinated by the prog sounds so trendy at the time (having briefly played with Jethro Tull), decided to insert more avant-garde elements into the group's style. The result is Black Sabbath Vol 4, a symbol of the first shift, which in my opinion has more flaws than merits.

If there is one term that can describe this album, it is "discontinuous": the two types of tracks present, namely the classic Sabbath-songs and those a moment more avant-garde, find it very hard to integrate with each other, creating a strong fracture in the compactness of the album itself. Another very, very painful point is that the experiments Iommi decided to propose are absolutely incomplete and confused, musical abortions left halfway that did not convince me at all: what to say about the piano ballad "Changes", with its naive melodies and Ozzy's voice unnecessarily supported by a synthesized echo? Or the very brief "FX", a noise piece whose sense I have yet to grasp? Or even the acoustic "Laguna Sunrise", so wasted and monotonous, far from the minimal perfection of "Orchid" and "Embryo", from Master of Reality? The general impression is that of a jumble of poorly developed ideas, left only in potential, that do not go beyond the dimension of filler. On the other hand, even the "classic" songs do not shine at all: in particular, I wonder how hordes of fans can consider "Snowblind" a masterpiece, which not only does not go beyond what the group has already done in the past but, together with "Tomorrow's Dream", "Supernaut" and "Cornucopia", represents the peak of the Sabbath's stylistic crisis, as they no longer know what to offer to an audience increasingly inclined towards the avant-garde of art rock.

The next album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, will show a greater mastery of means and above all a convincing blend, finally, between sulfurous hard rock and progressive atmospheres. Vol 4, instead, remains a transitional album that says nothing new and at the same time poorly restates what has been done up to that moment, too often overrated and considered on par with a masterpiece.