Critical Reception
Professional ratings | |
---|---|
Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
Allmusic | |
Robert Christgau | C– |
Rolling Stone | unfavourable |
The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
Sputnikmusic | 4.0/5 |
While the album was a commercial success and is now lauded as perhaps the first true heavy metal album, upon its release it was widely panned by critics. In a review for Rolling Stone magazine, rock critic Lester Bangs felt Sabbath was "just like Cream! But worse." Bangs dismissed Black Sabbath as "a shuck—despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés".
With the passage of time, reviews have become more positive. Steve Huey, for example, wrote for Allmusic that "Sabbath's slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness", commenting that the album featured "plenty of metal classics". Mike Stagno of Sputnikmusic stated that "both fans of blues influenced hard rock and heavy metal of all sorts should find something they like on the album".
Read more about this topic: Black Sabbath (album)
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“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Hes leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropfs and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)