Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (LP)

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ is the fifth studio album by English rock band Black Sabbath, released in December 1973. It was produced by the band and Tom Allom and recorded at Morgan Studios in London. Building off the stylistic changes introduced on ‘Vol 4’, new songs incorporated synthesizers, strings, keyboards and more complex arrangements. The lyrics also delved into new areas, with Mojo opining in 2013, “The title track led into an expansive set as Butler's lyrics contemplated the mysteries of birth and DNA in ‘A National Acrobat’ and "Spiral Architect', respectively.” Singer, Ozzy Osbourne wrote that ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ was “Our last truly great album, I think… And with the music we'd managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ si­de.” Drew Struzan (who would later create the iconic cover to Alice Cooper's ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’ LP) was the artist requested to do the cover painting, under the direction of Pacific Eye & Ear's Ernie Cefalu. The idea behind the artwork was to depict a man dying a horrible death on the front cover, and on the back cover the same man dying a “good” death. 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. 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”. Allmusic'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”. The album marked the band's fifth consecutive platinum selling album in the United States. It reached number four on the UK charts, and number eleven in the US. 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.