Black Sabbath (album) - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

While the album was a commercial success and is now lauded as perhaps the first true heavy metal album, upon its release it was widely panned by critics. In a review for Rolling Stone magazine, rock critic Lester Bangs felt Sabbath was "just like Cream! But worse." Bangs dismissed Black Sabbath as "a shuck—despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés".

With the passage of time, reviews have become more positive. Steve Huey, for example, wrote for Allmusic that "Sabbath's slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness", commenting that the album featured "plenty of metal classics". Mike Stagno of Sputnikmusic stated that "both fans of blues influenced hard rock and heavy metal of all sorts should find something they like on the album".