My name is Lucifer, please take my hand

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath - 1970

"Unskilled laborers..."
"just like Cream! But worse"
"Bullshit necromancy"
"The worst of the counterculture"
If one thing is clear from my revisiting albums chronologically, is that critics and "experts" alike tended to fail when it came to having any idea about the potential of a band.
Don't get me wrong, I understand them a bit, in this case. What we have here is an album so massive, brilliant and ahead of its times, that it would not only pretty much create the whole heavy metal genre, but influence musicians for longer than perhaps any other album in history.
About 5 years before this album, 17-year-old Tony Iommi suffered an industrial accident on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory. The accident caused the loss of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. Iommi is left-handed, and at the time of the accident he had been playing the guitar for 7 years or so. Because of the accident he was told he would never play again. He considered it for a while, but eventually decided that he would continue playing. Because playing caused too much pain, he started using two homemade thimbles on his fingers. That made it more difficult for him to feel the strings, and also harder to bend them. Eventually, he tuned his guitar to lower pitches, which made it easier for him to bend them. According to many, this gave Black Sabbath their characteristic heavier sound.
Regardless of whether or not the sounds were caused by Iommi's injuries, I always loved the story of how he managed to pull through, and I have always been in awe of how pretty much every rock music that I love has emerged from this guy.
There's not much more to say about this album. Only that it made me very happy to see that I was going to listen to it, and in an even better mood to actually listen to it.

• One of the reasons why Iommi decided to continue playing was because his foreman had him listen to jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who had also lost the mobility of two of his fingers in a fire, and went on to become one of the greatest musicians of the past century.
• The title track has a bizarre story attached to it. Bassist Geezer Butler was into the occult, had painted his room black, got himself a book on the subject, put some inverted crosses, you get the picture. One night he woke up from sleep and saw a black figure standing at the end of his bed. He got up to find the figure disappear. The occult book was also gone. 
• While "N.I.B." has been interpreted to mean "Nativity in Black", the story of the title seems to be much more pedestrian: it started as a joke about drummer Bill Ward's goatee, which they said looked like a "pen nib". Because they couldn't think of a name for the song, they left it as "nib" and added punctuation to make it look more intriguing.
• The whole album was recorded in only one day, with very little effects added in the mixing stage, and on a shoestring budget. 
• And remember: When you're feeling down thinking that life is hard on you, think of Tony Iommi. Or better yet, play this album as loud as possible.

I stood high upon a mountain top

Eric Burdon and War - Eric Burdon declares "War" - 1970

I'm not too sure what I was expecting with this one, but sure as hell I wasn't expecting this. 

So, Eric Burdon was in The Animals in the mid 1960s, then when they disbanded, came Eric Burdon and The Animals, and I covered their Winds of Change album, from 1967, which was a bit of a strange album, but quite good. 

And now we have funk. 

As I said, unexpected. It's not a genre I know too much about it, and this album is not pure funk, but rather a mixture of funk, blues and latin rhythms. 

I found it a bit long, not necessarily the album itself, but it's 5 songs here, two of them over 13 minutes, and all of the songs are a bit repetitive, so they feel a bit long. 

• "Mother Earth" is a cover, originally written by Memphis Slim. I wrote about the eponymous band, who played it in their album Living With The Animals. I even posted the video for the song, and I'm going to post their version because even if a bit long, I think it's a great version.