Spawned from a club jam session, the track began to coalesce when Tony Iommi hit upon its iconic two-chord riff, Butler and Ward’s swinging, jazzy rhythm acting as a counterpoint to the stop-start dynamic. The bassist was trying to paint a fantastical, Hieronymus Bosch-style vision of hell on earth, skewering “war-mongers… the real satanists… the people trying to get the working classes to fight their wars for them”. Originally titled Walpurgis, a title rejected by Vertigo as “too satanic”, War Pigs was born out of conversations Butler had with returning Vietnam veterans on American military bases in Germany. It’s ironic that Black Sabbath were often painted as misanthropic harbingers of destruction and misery, when in fact there was a hypermoralist, humanist core to many of Geezer Butler’s early lyrics. Introduced by a thumping unison riff from Iommi and Butler, the track quickly drops down to bass/drums to showcase RJD’s remarkable voice, before exploding into a widescreen chorus, a choral midsection, a dazzling, effects-laden Iommi solo and an exhilarating, galloping coda rounded off by several classical guitar flourishes.Įpic, adventurous, dramatic and uplifting, it’s little wonder Dio cited it as his favourite-ever recording. Other epithets can be applied to the title track of the rejuvenated Sabbath’s first record with Ronnie Dio, but ‘majestic’ pretty much covers it. Honed during the band’s early residency at the Star Club in Hamburg, the song moves from that simple opening riff into a crunching descending chord pattern overlaid with a sparkling Iommi solo before resolving back to that intro. found Sabbath inventing a new vocabulary for heavy, blues-based rock. Geezer Butler’s instantly memorable, fuzzed-out bass riff might have been blatantly indebted to Cream, but N.I.B. Lyrically it’s mysterious, intriguing and brilliant, and the structure of the song couldn’t be better.” - Ben Ward, Orange Goblin It’s probably the greatest and most brutal riff that Tony Iommi has ever written, Bill Ward’s drum fills are phenomenal, Geezer Butler’s bass lines are genius and add another layer of heavy, and Ozzy delivers what I think is his greatest vocal performance of all time. It is everything that’s great about Black Sabbath rolled into six-and-a-half minutes. “It’s heavy, it’s savage, it’s aggressive, it’s melodic and it’s beautiful.
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