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Description

Black Sabbath is credited with creating heavy metal. The success of their first two albums - Black Sabbath and Paranoid - marked a paradigm shift in the world of rock. Not until Black Sabbath upended the music scene did the term "heavy metal" enter the popular vocabulary to describe the denser, more thunderous offshoot of rock over which they presided. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the fifth studio album by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released in December 1973 (UK) and 1974 (U.S.) With this album, the band expanded upon their slow, crunching style of music by adding strings, keyboards and more complex orchestral arrangements. Drew Struzan was the artist requested to do the cover painting, under the direction of Ernie Cefalu. It depicts a man on a bed, seemingly having a nightmare or a vision of being attacked by demons in human form. At the top of the bed is a large skull with long, outstretched arms and 666 (the Number of the Beast) written below it. The other side of the album features the opposite of the front cover, as shown here. Inside the gatefold sleeve there is a photo of the band members shown over a photo of a bedroom. Black Sabbath released Sabbath Bloody Sabbath on 1 December 1973. For the first time in their career, the band began to receive favourable reviews in the mainstream press, with Rolling Stone calling the album "an extraordinarily gripping affair", and "nothing less than a complete success".[6] Later reviewers such as All Music's Eduardo Rivadavia cite the album as "a masterpiece, essential to any heavy metal collection", while also displaying "a newfound sense of finesse and maturity".[5] The album marked the band's fifth consecutive platinum selling album in the United States. It reached number four on the UK charts,[8] and number eleven in the US.[9] In the UK, it was the first Black Sabbath album to attain Silver certification (60,000 units sold) by the British Phonographic Industry, achieving this in February 1975.