After spending much of my life believing Black Sabbath to be wholly evil (as a child in the Evangelical Church) or wholly outdated (as a self-serious hipster), I’ve spent the last couple years slowly working my way through their catalogue—and learning just how wrong I was.
Throughout the early records, the band gets progressively heavier with each release. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath certainly doesn’t stop that trajectory at all, but neither does it rely on heaviness alone as a compositional device. The result is some of the most cathartic and gorgeous music ever written.