Death
Summer 2025 was not kind to metal. The death of Ozzy was every bit as a dramatic and stage managed as expected. Somehow surprising us all despite the very literal realisation of the inevitable. The suicide of Nisse Karlen prompted me to undergo a detailed re-appraisal of Sacremantum’s discography. Their set at September’s Cosmic Void festival in that London suddenly pregnant with a deeper meaning, with Heljarmadr filling in on vocal duties for a rendition of ‘Far Away from the Sun’ in full. Members donning At the Gates t-shirts in turn a reminder of the untimely passing of Tomas Lindberg. In the case of both him and Bethlehem’s Jürgen Bartsch, despite being much younger than Ozzy, it hammered home the fact that we st…
Death
Summer 2025 was not kind to metal. The death of Ozzy was every bit as a dramatic and stage managed as expected. Somehow surprising us all despite the very literal realisation of the inevitable. The suicide of Nisse Karlen prompted me to undergo a detailed re-appraisal of Sacremantum’s discography. Their set at September’s Cosmic Void festival in that London suddenly pregnant with a deeper meaning, with Heljarmadr filling in on vocal duties for a rendition of ‘Far Away from the Sun’ in full. Members donning At the Gates t-shirts in turn a reminder of the untimely passing of Tomas Lindberg. In the case of both him and Bethlehem’s Jürgen Bartsch, despite being much younger than Ozzy, it hammered home the fact that we still navigate culture via the towering monoliths of the 20th Century. And with this old world gradually melting away beyond living memory, very little looks set to replace it. Adrift, we atrophy, interpreting the work of the dead in the absence of any meaningful, living statement on the present.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the popular, common sense take is the correct one. ‘Paranoid’ just *is *the best Black Sabbath album. The debut may be more eerie and iconic, the muscle tissue of ‘Master of Reality’ heavier, and subsequent albums more flamboyant and daring. But ‘Paranoid’ remains the most complete artistic statement, the most well balanced, consistent, and rich.
As one of the most scrutinised albums of the 20th Century, looking at it afresh is a challenge unto itself. Ozzy has received plenty of criticism over the years. Like any ubiquitous icon, some of this is empty contrarianism, some is simply a function of the length and breadth of his career. On a technical level, he was a subpar vocalist who always managed to surround himself with more talented musicians, getting by on sheer clownish charisma. Whilst there is some truth to this, it’s a simplification. That he was the least talented member of the original Sabbath lineup has, if anything, led us to somewhat underrate his abilities and the importance of his contributions to germinal heavy metal.
I recently found myself watching a short video by Rick Beato, the kindly but rage baiting music theory YouTube daddy. He was playing the isolated vocal track on the song ‘Paranoid’, and glibly asked the viewer “does Ozzy’s voice sound like anyone?”. This simple rhetorical question cuts to the heart of the matter. It allowed me to refresh my perception of his performances across this era of Sabbath, an icon of understatement. For all the flamboyance of Ozzy the individual, his voice is oddly restrained, measured, sober, decorating the most iconic riffs in rock with a rare balance and musical wit. The gymnastics of Robert Plant or Ian Gillan look positively flamboyant by comparison. Ozzy’s deadpan delivery marked Sabbath out as uniquely “heavy” amongst their contemporaries.
And the subject matter of ‘Paranoid’ is heavy, the delivery heavy, the overall experience rich, dense, total. This comes through most starkly in the interaction of Ozzy’s monosyllabic voice and the droning inertia of Iommi’s riffing. Sure there’s plenty of groove across these tracks, and plenty of residual bluesy playfulness. But the framework propping up the entire edifice are these slow, deliberate riffs drifting across the album like monolithic icebergs. Undergirded by Ozzy’s vocal melodies that often just follow the contours of the riff, lending the experience a unified momentum, a monotonous flow that gradually morphs into a terrible inevitability.
This album also laid the groundwork for the limited timbre of metal. A single guitar track dominates the mix throughout, with little variation in effect, tone, and – were it not for the many now iconic guitar leads – even pitch. This focuses the mind into a meditative state, forcing it to confront the simple flow of riffs in their totality. There is only the riff, its grim significance, its heaviness.
Motion comes from what is arguably the most talented branch of this lineup, the rhythm section. The loose, informal framing they furnished on the debut – particularly on the track ‘Black Sabbath’ – is every bit as important to the eldritch atmosphere of this eponymous opening number as “that” riff. On ‘Paranoid’ Geezer Butler and Bill Ward adopt a tighter stance. Even slower numbers like ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Iron Man’ receive a more deliberate, metronomic pulse, lending the music a degree of mechanistic dread that signalled a shift away from the occultism of the debut toward themes of industrial warfare, nuclear terror, and PTSD fuelled drug use. The bass and drums undulate beneath Iommi’s guitar, forcing it into odd contortions and angular tangents, upsetting the deliberate, linear flow of his riffing. Whilst tension arises from the anticipation created by depressed tempos, it also emanates from the strangely lilting, unpredictable flow of the music, like waves crashing on a beach with varying degrees of intensity.
John Tardy, Martin van Drunen, Tomas Lindberg, these are perhaps the most expressive and intense vocalists out of the early crop of death metal. One curious feature of Lindberg in particular is the fact that his voice dramatically evolved across At the Gates’s initial run. From the animalistic passion of the debut, the more contained yet no less emotive outbursts decorating ‘With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness’, the monstrous flair of ‘Terminal Spirit Disease’, and the measured high end crooning on ‘Slaughter of the Soul’, now industry standard for melodic death metal.
The debut EP then, represents an interesting outlier in more ways than one. A young Lindberg is perhaps at his most typically death metal, if we exclude the raw thrash aggression of the early Grotesque demos. A somewhat fitting accompaniment to this more dirge ridden, monstrous At the Gates. The idiosyncratic melodic forms are already in fruition, here delivered with a dark, muscular energy in stark contrast to the open, bright sound found on ‘The Red in the Sky is Ours’.
This has given ‘Gardens of Grief’ a near cultlike status in the underground, with some going so far as to claim that this is the best thing At the Gates ever did. Whilst this can seem like a strange claim given that many of the elements present here can be found on the debut album, there’s no denying that ‘The Red in the Sky is Ours’ is delivered with a more fluid, light touch approach, evincing a delicacy and fragility that is not to everyone’s taste, being rarities in death metal, especially of this era.
‘Gardens of Grief’, by contrast, staggers along with a dark, surrealist malevolence at once haunting and physically demanding. In the broadest sense of the term this is still highly melodic metal, but the topography is all its own, building an internal logic completely at odds with listener expectations to the point that it seems to contort itself into something totally alien, unknowable. Unlike its companion piece ‘Soulside Journey’, tension arises not from chords sustained past the point of comfort, but through choppy, ascending licks hammered home ad absurdum, reaching a fever pitch of intensity that look all but unresolvable. In this sense it anticipates efforts such as ‘Nespithe’ and ‘Slumber of Sullen Eyes’, or the choppy, jagged meanderings of ‘North from Here’.
But even against this notoriously eerie early Finnish material ‘Gardens of Grief’ stands apart for its emotiveness. This no indifferent horror, or a natural presence unaware of and uncaring toward human affairs. The grief is immediate, psychological. But unlike other attempts to insert a first person perspectives into extreme metal – Opeth or Katatonia for instance – the experience is still a transcendent one, reaching for a degree of permanence beyond the perceptual present. The music is invested in the human condition. Frantic, urgent, despairing, yet unrelentingly reflective, curious, probing.
I’m usually pretty adept at overlooking a duff vocal performance, but Rainer Landfermann’s overworked and frankly excessively German efforts on ‘Dictius Te Necare’ ruins an otherwise quality album. For that reason I usually take refuge in the debut, ‘Dark Metal’.
This album remains admirable for conveying a pervasive, drab poise throughout despite the relatively austere presentation. Reminiscent of the get-up-and-go riffing mentality of Samael of the same era, a captivating gloom arises not from a wash of guitar noise or foggy production but from the riffs and melodies themselves. Not least the distinctive basslines cutting through the thin guitar tone with distinctive, funereal interjections that both bolster the aesthetic whilst also adding to the idea that – for all its ambient qualities – this is a band interacting with each other in the moment and not a highly orchestrated studio panorama of atmospheric melodrama.
What begins as a relatively energetic, even bouncy unveiling of literal dark metal in the tradition of Celtic Frost incrementally evolves into explicit doom metal, unfurling riffs that would be quite at home on a My Dying Bride or even Candlemass album. But the two competing impulses, the activism of black metal and the fatalism of doom, balance the emotional currency of the album, representing an expansion of the expressive range of each as opposed to the neutering of form. This is borne out by Andreas Classen’s measured vocal performance as it reaches for guttural depths alongside gruff, midrange distorted crooning.
Creativity and originality come from effective use of harmony, the laboured development of theme as it builds through the narrative goes some way to justifying the album’s excessive length. The sense of journey, continuation, of moving through events, places, regions, in beleaguered, tentative steps makes the progression from one passage to the next feel earned. Acres of droning, repetitive marches come with gradualist rewards, cherished for the degree of toil the listener undertook to encounter them.
In this sense the album is only superficially hopeless. Beyond the surface level aesthetic, the explicit despondency of the tonal palette, the very title of the album referring to the subgenre that never was, the experience of ‘Dark Metal’ is nevertheless oddly life affirming for the trials it puts the listener through.