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It would be misleading to argue that Vol. 4 is the work of Black Sabbath at the peak of their powers. When you’re the band that recorded “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and “Paranoid,” and you put them all on the same album, congratulations, that’s the peak of your powers. But *Vol. 4—*recently reissued with a full haul of outtakes, false starts, and live versions—is a close second. The sense of scale, the lyrical directness, and the sheer riff-crunching power that mark the band at their best are all here, along with several signature Sabbath tunes. Paranoid might top the list, but Vol. 4 is indispensable metal in its own right.
Having previously recorded exclusively in England with producer Rodger Bain, Sabbath opted to self-produce their fourth outing, recording it in sunny Los Angeles. If you’re guessing that their new locale exposed these four suddenly rich blue-collar kids from Birmingham to heretofore unprecedented Hollywood excess, you guessed right: By all accounts, the band consumed absolutely Olympian quantities of cocaine during Vol. 4’s recording, with guitarist Tony Iommi claiming to have had the stuff flown in on a private plane and bassist Geezer Butler recently joking (or is he?!?) that the coke bill exceeded the cost of actually, you know, recording the album.
You can glean all that information from interviews and behind-the-scenes accounts, or you can simply listen to “Snowblind,” the album’s centerpiece. (In fact, its riff is similar enough to album opener “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” that it almost serves as a reprise.) As Ozzy Osbourne lays down a blizzard of snowy metaphors for his drug of choice—at one point he whispers “cocaine,” in case the subject matter isn’t clear—Iommi and Butler serve up a riff that feels four feet deep, while Bill Ward’s drums skitter and thud in equal measure. (Ward’s unpredictability behind the kit has always been one aspect of Sabbath that their many heirs and imitators have failed to reproduce.) At times, the lyrics are so evocative (“Let the winter sun shine on/Let me feel the frost of dawn”) that they seem to anticipate the snowbound Viking saga of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” released a year later. At others, they depict the welcoming embrace of drug dependence with unexpected pathos: “This is where I feel I belong,” Ozzy sings in the song’s breakdown—a rough but relatable sentence for anyone who’s struggled with addiction, or loved someone who has.
Rejection of square society is the order of the day across several of the set’s songs. “Tomorrow’s Dream” is about leaving your problems behind by any available means, with the contrast between the grim present and glorious future encapsulated by the break between the verses’ steamrolling riff and the soaring guitars of the chorus. “Cornucopia” condescends to the normies, with their “matchbox cars and mortgaged joys…frozen food in a concrete maze.” For a band that has a bad rap for Satanic worship—you’ll find the devil all over the place in their body of work, but he’s invariably the bad guy—“Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes” sure is a blistering kiss-off to “Jesus freaks” and “preacher[s] telling me about the god in the sky.”