Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath Vol. 4 - LP

"Black Sabbath Vol. 4" is the name of the music album released in 1972 by the English music group Black Sabbath. This album is also a studio work, carrying on in the spirit of the previous three albums, but newly incorporating acoustics and sound effects. The tracks FX and Laguna Sunrise are purely instrumental, unlike the rest of the songs on this record.

The group seems to have "matured" and shows on this album how far they had come in the two years since the release of their first album, Black Sabbath, and how much they had progressed in their musical development. This doesn't mean they radically changed their style of music, but that they had further advanced in developing their typical "Sabbath-esque" approach to songwriting.

Even before recording their fourth album, which was originally supposed to be named after the cocaine-themed song "Snowblind", the group declared that their new release would be more musically diverse, and they kept their promise. Here we find both hard "classics" in the form of the songs "Supernaut", "Cornucopia", or "Under The Sun", as well as the eight-minute progressive composition "Wheels of Confusion". The instrumental "Laguna Sunrise" and the ballad "Changes" reveal the band's hitherto hidden lyrical side. With "Vol. 4", Black Sabbath also began to experiment more musically. In the song "Changes", they used a synthesiser for the very first time, and Butler plays a mellotron on it; "Laguna Sunrise" was complemented by strings. LP Vol. 4 is an unassuming, yet track-wise very strong, studio album.

On the back cover of the album is Ozzy Osbourne standing at a microphone in a turtleneck with long, would-be cowboy fringes on the sleeves, and on the front is Ozzy in a similar, if not the same, pose, but only as a yellow filled-in silhouette on a black background.