(Review from wikipedia, progarchives.com)

The historic four members of Black Sabbath went to the same Birmingham secondary school but played in two separate groups.

Tony Iommi initially played guitar left-handed. He lost two fingertips of his fretting hand in an industrial work-related accident at the age of 17. This almost convinced him to stop music but his foreman offered him a Django Reinhardt album (who also had limited use of his fretting hand) and this helped Iommi overcoming his handicap. After attempting to learn to play right-handed, Iommi strung his guitars with extra-light strings (using banjo strings, which were a lighter gauge than even the lightest guitar-strings of the time) and wore plastic covers over the two damaged fingers. He fashioned the latter himself, by melting plastic liquid-soap bottles into a ball and then using a soldering iron to make holes into this ball, putting his fingers in while the plastic was still soft enough to be shaped. He then trimmed and sanded away the excess plastic to leave himself with two thimbles, which he then covered with leather, to provide better grip on the strings.

Following the breakup of their previous band in 1968, guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward sought to form a heavy blues band. They enlisted bassist Geezer Butler, and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne. The new group also featured slide guitarist Jimmy Phillips and saxophonist Alan “Aker” Clarke but after two gigs these two were dismissed and the band continued as a four-piece with the name “Earth”.

“Earth” played club shows in England, Denmark, and Germany, with sets consisting of cover songs by Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and Cream; as well as lengthy improvised blues jams. In December 1968. While playing shows in England in 1969, the band discovered they were being mistaken for another English group named “Earth”, and decided to again change their name.

A movie theater across the street from the band’s rehearsal room was showing the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film Black Sabbath. While watching people line up to see the film, bassist Geezer Butler noted that it was “strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies”. Butler wrote a song titled “Black Sabbath” after reading a book by occult writer Dennis Wheatley, and seeing a black-hooded figure standing at the foot of his bed. Making use of the musical tritone, also known as “The Devil’s Interval”, the song’s ominous sound and dark lyrics pushed the band in a darker direction, a stark contrast to the popular music of the late 1960s, which was dominated by flower power, folk music, and hippie culture. Inspired by the new sound, the band changed their name to Black Sabbath in August 1969, and made the decision to focus writing similar material, in an attempt to create the musical equivalent of horror films.

It is difficult to find a more influential album in the heavy metal genre than Black Sabbath’s debut album. Graced with a gloomy old mill filtered photo with a so-called witch, the Brummie quartet went straight for the dark side of rock and their sinister looks sporting large crosses were certainly enhancing intently this image. Recorded and produced (almost inexistently by Rodger Bain) in just two days, this might seem today a real botch job in the light of modern technology, but it is precisely this rough, raw finish that gave this album its aura.

If anything must represent heavy metal, than the eponymous album opener is it: from its thunderstorm and bell intro, to the sinister slow descending riff (based on Gustav Holtz’s Mars piece from The Planets Suite) and Geezer Butler-inspired depressive lyrics, the group cannot help but launch a chain of reaction in everyone.

The following gloomy “Wizard” track is a blues-derived riff-laden song with an unusual pace and the dreamy, almost ambient by their standard, “Wall Of Sleep” with its great slower mid-section are not as much attention-grabbing, but remain quite solid tracks that make this album an all-time classic.

Closing the first side is an epic love song (NIB is not Nativity In Black), starting on a pulsating bass solo, than Iommi’s solid guitar riff takes over accompanying an average Osbourne vocal line, but for some reasons, the whole thing works quite fine and this track remains a classic to this day. Ward’s jazzy drumming throughout the album brings a bit of lightness to his three mate’s overpowering heaviness. Butler’s style is also bringing much air, as he generally shadows Iommi’s riffs (instead of countering or underlining them) and plays much like his inspiration, Cream’s Jack Bruce.

The flipside starts on a rare cover, the groovy bass-ed up Evil woman, which was originally intended as the single. “Sleeping Village” seems like a collage of three pieces, but comes off well in its second half, and might be as close as the band gets to an instrumental on this album. As this track ends in a feedback, the most impressive almost 11-min “Warning” (an Ainsley Dunbar Retaliation cover) starts exactly on that same feedback, and although it might appear as completely indulgent nowadays, it is one of the most Sabbath tune ever. Indeed the track is full of “solo” playing that seem to drag on a bit, especially Iommi’s guitar twangs in the middle section, but it got most future metalheads understanding what Iommi’s modified sound was all about. The closing “Wicked World” is another great Black Sabbath track, getting lost in the shuffle of their first two albums’ abundance of good ideas.

Line-up:
* Tony Iommi – Lead Guitar & Keyboards
* Geezer Butler – Bass
* Ozzy Osbourne – Vocals
* Bill Ward – Drums

Track List:
01. Black Sabbath – 6:21
02. The Wizard – 4:24
03. Behind The Wall Of Sleep – 3:37
04. N.I.B. – 6:08
05. Evil Woman – 3:24
06. Sleeping Village – 10:44
07. Warning – 3:31

Link in comments.