Black sabbath album covers series#

'It was done in acrylic on canvas, and measured about 4 by 6 feet,' he says. 'And I took the shape of the wings from photos of vultures eating a carcass.'Īll told, Smoking Angels took Curlee three weeks to complete. 'The original idea for the painting came from a photo in a newspaper of some people backstage at a Christmas pageant,' Curlee explains. Many fans assumed the cover art had been inspired by the tunes, but of course this was not the case, since Smoking Angels had been completed before Warner Bros. Songs like opener 'Neon Knights,' 'Die Young,' and the title track would go on to become metal classics. Released in early 1980, Heaven and Hell restored Sabbath's floundering reputation after the band's final two Ozzy-fronted full-lengths, the inferior Technical Ecstasy (1976) and meandering Never Say Die! (1978). The original cover-art plan was not working out, and someone decided to call me to ask if I had anything they might be able to use, since the timing was getting short.' Curlee sent them a photo of Smoking Angels Warner Bros. 'Black Sabbath were releasing a new album called Heaven and Hell. The label liked the cover painting he'd done for Blue Öyster Cult's 1976 album, Agents of Fortune, which coincidentally also featured playing cards. Around this time, Curlee got a call from Warner Bros. Among the paintings was a piece called Smoking Angels, which featured three female angels playing cards and puffing on cigarettes.

Black sabbath album covers series#

Meanwhile, in California, painter Lynn Curlee was exhibiting a series of paintings titled 'Masque' at the Dunaway-O'Neill Gallery in Santa Monica, which was co-owned by actress Faye Dunaway. If you do attempt to play the etching on Side B it will sound absolutely awful.By late 1979, Black Sabbath had kicked vocalist Ozzy Osbourne to the curb for being chronically wasted and were in the midst of recording their first album with former Rainbow chalice-hoister Ronnie James Dio. Side B is a gorgeous etching of a black ram by artist Will Schaff.

Note to buyer: Do not attempt to play Side B of this 7” release. Recorded in the midwest in the late '90s, during Molina’s multi-season run of batting 1.000, these two intimate songs are a bittersweet artifact of one of the rustbelt’s titan songwriters. Molina’s brief acoustic cover dials back the bombast, but you can surely connect “Snowblind”’s chord progressions with Molina’s own on the black album and Axxess & Ace. Molina seemed to pull from Iommi’s odd, simple fingerings and tunings throughout his catalogue: from his first album (known informally as “the black album”) to Magnolia Electric Co.’s Josephine. 4, it becomes obvious what a guitar hero Sabbath’s Tony Iommi was for Molina. And on his cover of “Snowblind,' from 1972’s Vol. Molina extracts Ozzy Osbourne’s gorgeously cooed vocal performance and transforms it into a high and lonesome sound, a desert campfire howler. He takes “Solitude,” from 1971’s unfuckwithable Master of Reality - and one of Sabbath’s more mystical, near-proggy songs - and doubles down on the title. Molina, a through-and-through fan of metal (seek out his high school metal band the Spineriders' album if you haven’t yet) peels back the sinister and stoned elements of Sabbath, zeroing in on the loneliness and brooding. This pair of newly discovered, home-recorded Black Sabbath covers is no different. Be it Conway Twitty or Townes Van Zandt, their blues were infused with Molina's own entrancing blues. When Jason Molina took on another artist’s song, he willed his own universe into it, his own personal and artistic mythology.