Black Sabbath

★★★★★ Paranoid: Super Deluxe Box Set BMG. CD/DL/LP Hard rock colossi’s second album gets a 50th anniversary paintjob. So ubiquitous is Paranoid’s title track, it’s odd hearing a 22-year-old Ozzy Osbourne introducing it “as a number off our new album” in 1970. You get a lot of Paranoid for your money on this 4-CD/5-LP edition: the original album; a 1974 quad mix; 1970 live shows from Montreux and Brussels. Everything about the original album – be it bassist/lyricist Geezer Butler’s stoner poems about bloodshed and pestilence or Tony Iommi’s concrete-mixer guitar riffs – still sounds like an instruction manual for metal bands in 2020. War Pigs, Hand Of Doom, even that fleeting moment of subtlety, Planet Caravan, haven’t aged a jot. Elsewhere, the live shows demonstrate what an unholy din the young Sabbath conjured away from a sterile recording studio; the malevolent, disembodied voice introducing them on-stage at Brussels’ Théâtre 101 – “Bleck Sebbeth!” – sounding like Lucifer himself. Mark Blake