Okay, it’s true, if we want to nitpick about the first five Sabbath albums, this is the one I appreciate slightly less, due to both a somewhat lower overall quality of the tracks compared to the previous three (but just a little, a little that feels like "who cares") and my unconditional love for "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"; as I said, I’m nitpicking, and if I keep saying that their first five albums should be taken as a whole, each one cooler than the last, there must be a reason. It’s not, as I’ve sometimes heard, an album that changes direction from the previous ones; there’s at most a pinch more variety but nothing significant, in the end, it’s the same kind of variety that you also find in "Paranoid" and "Master". Here, there’s "Changes", beautifully stepping away from the proto-doomic and pachydermic riffs, and there’s also "Laguna Sunrise", but in the previous albums, there were "Planet Caravan" or "Solitude," so there isn’t too much change in the script (in short, if there’s an album with a more pronounced shift, then it’s the next one, not this one). The opening and closing tracks ("Wheels of Confusion" and "Under the Sun") are masterpieces, and there’s plenty of other meaty content in between. A heavyweight album.
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