Favorite Black Sabbath Album?

[Axalon]

Ok, I’ll bite Kurando… It’s definitely the first album for me; Black Sabbath, no doubt.

Funny enough, pretty much for the very opposite reasons as stipulated by Rev here (sorry for that man). Its essentially provides the purest and heaviest Sabbath sound to date in my mind - the ultimate Sabbath sound (excellently demonstrated in "the Wizard" or "NIB" for instance). They never managed to quite get back there, on that scale anyhow, after that album (still there were a lot of outstanding stuff that followed of course). Anyway, these guys sadly enough created the template for heavy metal and I essentially can’t stand that stuff personally.

It becomes very apparent on the “Masters of the reality” – which with few exceptions was a swan dive into that stuff which later on become the swamp of heavy metal (still I do like "Sweat leaf" for instance). They pretty much invented the darn thing - a remarkable deed regardless of the fact that I do hate it as musical style and format. ....As long as they played heavy and slowish rock these boys do rock – real good! The magic bass of Geezer Butler and unique drums of Bill Ward are the big secret behind the massive sound of Black Sabbath I think.

Tony Iommy is of course a very good guitarist with strong, raw and distinctive personality no doubt - but to me it is really the drums and bass that brings the magic, sound-wise. Iommy's guitar strikes me as only adding further conture and detail to the magic of Sabbath and not the fundamentals for it. At any rate, Iommy is a very good composer and he did show that consistlently in the 70's and he really could at times create pure and outstanding excellence in that sense - for instance "Planet Caravan" and "Laguna sunrise" - I rest my case...

While I still love the more "rockier" Deep Purple and Led Zeppelins earlier stuff - I would have still prefered Black Sabbath if I was forced choose between them. They just hit closer to home in general for me – that said; both Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin have truly done some outstanding rock stuff here and there… "Highway star" and "Black dog" comes to mind while I write this....



A question of my own here; why was the Dio-album included? It kind of strikes me as saying that David Coverdale was ever a part of the definitive line up of Deep Purple - which he obviously was not. I'm just curious here nothing else. If you are up to it, perhaps you could elaburate some more on that?

- Cheers
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BTW, I did see these boys live (2000-ishy I think it was) and they truly rocked!
Hey, what did you expect...