"People think I'm insane because I am frowning all the time!"
The Film
Life often throws us weird coincidences that make it all the more interesting. The very day before this disc arrived in the post for me to review it, I'd decided to pull out my Deluxe Edition copy of Black Sabbath: Paranoid and give it a listen. For anyone who doesn't know, that is a 2009 2-disc release of the classic album that contains 1 CD and 1 DVD, which holds the original 1974 quadraphonic mix in a DTS 4.0 encoding.
So, when the Black Sabbath: Classic Albums -- Paranoid Blu-ray showed up the very next day, it really was pleasant and completely unexpected. I'd forgotten it was even supposed to be released. For those of you unfamiliar with the Classic Albums series, it basically takes a look at some of the seminal recordings in pop/rock history by sitting down with the artists and their musical collaborators such as the producers and recording engineers. It gives a brief history of the events surrounding the recording of the album and also seeks to place that album in the history of rock and roll. In other words, if it was a monumental achievement, artistically, commercially, critically, or all three, chances are good that there eventually will be a Classic Albums documentary done about it.
Albums that have already been given the Classic Albums treatment include The Who: Who's Next, U2: The Joshua Tree, Fleetwood Mac: Rumours, Metallica: The Black Album and Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, so you know that Sabbath are in good company.
The documentary gathers together the original members of the metal pioneers, Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Tony Iommy (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass), and Bill Ward (drums) along with their original recording engineer Tom Allom to dissect the 1970 heavy metal classic that has given the world (and frightened parents) such dark, thunderous gems as "War Pigs," the commentary on skinheads, "Faeries Wear Boots," "Iron Man," "Planet Caravan" and of course the rollicking eponymous track.
From their humble beginnings as a 12-bar-blues band in the shadows of Led Zeppelin to the ominous crafters of the morose who defined a genre with one paragon of a metal album, Black Sabbath: Classic Albums -- Paranoid will be required viewing for all fans of metal and Sabbath.
The Picture
The 1.78:1 1080i/60 AVC/MPEG-4 encoding of Paranoid is more than adequate for this sort of material. All of the new footage looks clean and detailed with little video noise, whilst the abundance of vintage footage looks its age with a lot of source damage, but still film-like. Compression and post-processing issues aren't a problem.
The Sound
Compared to the deluxe edition quadraphonic mix with the discrete pans around the room and the very punchy midrange I'd listened to the evening before, Classic Albums -- Paranoid's LPCM 2.0 soundtrack doesn't even scratch the surface of engagement, but for a documentary mix it serves its purpose. Dialogue is clear and intelligible and the sound of the music picks up with a spacious mix across the stereo field and significant heft during the brief archival performance snippets.
The Extras
What you get on Paranoid are more pieces of interview segments with the boys in the band and their collaborators, which couldn't be squeezed into the documentary itself, perhaps due to time constraints.
Final Thoughts
I wouldn't say that heavy metal began with Sabbath. Surely there were many who had to come before, like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, who opened up the hard rock genre for the band to step through. Black Sabbath: Classic Albums -- Paranoid, however, can offer a glimpse into not when metal was invented, but rather defined, and that makes all the difference.
Product Details
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