Album of the day (#3521): Paranoid by Black Sabbath

[albummaster]

Today's album of the day

Paranoid by Black Sabbath (View album | Buy this album)

Year: 1970.
Country:
Overall rank: 67
Average rating: 86/100 (from 1733 votes).

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tracks:
1. War Pigs
2. Paranoid
3. Planet Caravan
4. Iron Man
5. Electric Funeral
6. Hand Of Doom
7. Rat Salad
8. Fairies Wear Boots

About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.

[Timestarter]

Fun fact: Paranoid and Iron Man are the best tracks (IMO).

[Skinny]

Maybe their best. Sabbath really embodied, more than anybody else, the suffocating brick and mortar Victorian factories and workhouses, and grey, smog-filled skies, of industrial North Birmingham, much in the same way that Dexy's later came to embody the bustling marketplaces, Irish watering holes, and Afro-Caribbean nightclubs of the city's centre. They may not be the best Birmingham bands (although they're obviously both in the conversation, alongside Broadcast, The Streets, Steel Pulse), but they are the most Birmingham bands, a point often missed by those not au fait with the nooks and crannies of England's second city. To see Sabbath live in Birmingham, as I have twice, is to witness a group of relatively humble men capturing the vast history of a flawed city that many consider ugly. To walk up past the 'floozy in the jacuzzi' and see Gormley's Iron Man, a timeless sculpture whose form betrays its youth, and gaze upon the now-demolished Central Library, with its overhanging, neo-brutalist storeys casting wide shadows with hard lines over everything beneath it, is to see the same city represented by Sabbath's clearly defined, monolithic riffs and inherent paranoia, a city oft derided as unsophisticated by outsiders - like the band themselves - but full of buildings and statues and people that tell the story of modern Britain, for better or worse. Black Sabbath are Birmingham, and I will always love them (or the first four albums, at least) for it.
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2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.