Black Sabbath - 2004 - Black Box cd 4 - Vol. 4

Format » FLAC || Size » 1,29 GB || Category » Rock

(The Complete Original Black Sabbath 1970–1978)

Black Box: The Complete Original Black Sabbath 1970-1978 was released Apr 27, 2004 on the Rhino label. This box is a 8-disc set with 65 songs. The original eight Black Sabbath album masterpieces from the '70's, newly remastered and housed in one deluxe collection.

Although Ozzy Osbourne has had a huge cultural impact as both a solo artist and an unlikely TV star, his true legacy lies in the eight albums he recorded with Black Sabbath between 1970 and 1978. Though musical performers in various genres regularly conjured up images of evil (most notably the Rolling Stones on "Sympathy for the Devil"), no act ever actually sounded consistently evil until Sabbath's self-titled first record. The British quartet's sound arrived fully formed, with Tony Iommi's crushing guitar riffs, Geezer Butler's ominous bass lines, and Bill Ward's almost-tribal drumming perfectly complementing Osbourne's haunting vocals.

This gorgeously morbid, pitch-black box set chronicles Sabbath's development, including early-'70s tracks such as the doom-laden "Black Sabbath," the powerful anti-military song "War Pigs," and the fierce "Supernaut," all included on the group's indisputably influential first four albums. Even though the latter half of the set doesn't always rival the brilliance found on the former, the BLACK BOX, as a whole, reveals a formidable musical force that shaped the entire genre of heavy metal and permanently altered the landscape of rock & roll.

Format » MP3 / FLAC || Size » 106,9 MB / 307,2 MB || Category » Rock

(The Complete Original Black Sabbath 1970–1978)

Vol. 4 is the point in Black Sabbath's career where the band's legendary drug consumption really starts to make itself felt. And it isn't just in the lyrics, most of which are about the blurry line between reality and illusion. Vol. 4 has all the messiness of a heavy metal Exile on Main St., and if it lacks that album's overall diversity, it does find Sabbath at their most musically varied, pushing to experiment amidst the drug-addled murk. As a result, there are some puzzling choices made here (not least of which is the inclusion of "FX"), and the album often contradicts itself. Ozzy Osbourne's wail is becoming more powerful here, taking greater independence from Tony Iommi's guitar riffs, yet his vocals are processed into a nearly textural element on much of side two. Parts of Vol. 4 are as ultra-heavy as Master of Reality, yet the band also takes its most blatant shots at accessibility to date -- and then undercuts that very intent. The effectively concise "Tomorrow's Dream" has a chorus that could almost be called radio-ready, were it not for the fact that it only appears once in the entire song. "St. Vitus Dance" is surprisingly upbeat, yet the distant-sounding vocals don't really register. The notorious piano-and-Mellotron ballad "Changes" ultimately fails not because of its change-of-pace mood, but more for a raft of the most horrendously clichéd rhymes this side of "moon-June." Even the crushing "Supernaut" -- perhaps the heaviest single track in the Sabbath catalog -- sticks a funky, almost danceable acoustic breakdown smack in the middle. Besides "Supernaut," the core of Vol. 4 lies in the midtempo cocaine ode "Snowblind," which was originally slated to be the album's title track until the record company got cold feet, and the multi-sectioned prog-leaning opener, "Wheels of Confusion." The latter is one of Iommi's most complex and impressive compositions, varying not only riffs but textures throughout its eight minutes. Many doom and stoner metal aficionados prize the second side of the album, where Osbourne's vocals gradually fade further and further away into the murk, and Iommi's guitar assumes center stage. The underrated "Cornucopia" strikes a better balance of those elements, but by the time "Under the Sun" closes the album, the lyrics are mostly lost under a mountain of memorable, contrasting riffery. Add all of this up, and Vol. 4 is a less cohesive effort than its two immediate predecessors, but is all the more fascinating for it. Die-hard fans sick of the standards come here next, and some end up counting this as their favorite Sabbath record for its eccentricities and for its embodiment of the band's excesses.