The Best of Black Sabbath

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Black Sabbath

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If you are trying to find an overview of the largest part of Black Sabbath's career in as few discs as possible, then this package is for you. These two discs are packed to the max with 79 minutes of material each, adding up to over 2.5 hours of prime Sabbath, covering the band's history until 1983. Here you can track Sab's development from the slow and sludgy piledrivers of the early albums, to their peak of creativity and complexity in the mid-70's, to their late 70's decline - both before and after Ozzy got canned. This collection in fact contains just three post-Ozzy songs (two with Dio and one with Gillan) before avoiding Sab's complete early-80's downfall altogether.

However, I would mostly recommend this for non-collectors who are not too attached to the original albums. This is because diehards will probably gripe about the song selection. This always happens with compilations anyway, but here there's a reason to be concerned. Disc A, with 16 tracks, covers just the first three Sab albums, with a whopping six tracks from *Paranoid* alone (out of the original eight). Meanwhile disc B, also with 16 songs, covers eight original albums, with some albums getting just one song each. Sure most fans prefer those early albums anyway, as the early years are piled up with more bonafide Sab classics. But the album considered by many fans to be their best, 1974's *Sabbath Bloody Sabbath* is woefully underrepresented with just three tracks here. This is curious because of the inclusion of the mostly disposable (and chintzy) acoustic numbers "Embryo" and "Don't Start (Too Late)" which are taking up space that could be used more wisely. So if you're looking for a comprehensive overview, you're still getting your money's worth with this package, but the lopsided selections will deprive you of a large part of the band's history, if you're the analytical type. But if you can forgive that problem, and if you're not a diehard Sab collector, you'll be happy with this gigantic collection.