Review by Morpheus Kitami for Black Sabbath - Paranoid (1970)

Paranoid is more what I expect out of a Black Sabbath album, but still finds ways to be odd in retrospect. The sort of thing that reminds you that this is still really before metal is metal as we know it. We might owe heaviness to Sabbath, but in many ways it just isn't what we expect of metal.
Take War Pigs. There's nothing weird about War Pigs, right? Wrong. No one outside of a progressive or technical band would make anything like War Pigs. Metal bands don't devote sections of their song to short guitar riffs followed by drum fills. The more loose song structure here is far more alien to the average metal song, than say, a comparable hard rock song from a non-metal band.
In this sense, the hero of the album is Bill Ward. He might as well be called Peter, for he is the rock the rest of the band is built around. There might be better technical drummers, but in this moment, there is no drummer more precise than him. No drummer more perfect than him. Without him, songs like Paranoid or Iron Man would still be as heavy, but without him, they would lose that feeling of tightness that they enthralled the world with.
On an album full of hits, I feel like the real best song on the album is Electric Funeral. Keeping the doom metal spirit alive through sound rather than vibes. Takes a lot of skill to make a song with effectively one riff work for 5 minutes. Oh, sure, it has variations, but it's one riff. I guess there's a solo, but it has to be the simplest solo ever made.
Paranoid still remains within the confines of this weird heavy rock that retroactively became heavy metal. I think if anyone else did what this album did you'd see a progressive tag for sure. Which isn't a mark against it, just an observation about how it remains beloved in and out of the metal community.