10. Black SabbathWe Sold Our Soul For Rock & Roll

I bought this on the black market and I came home and was like, OK, because I’d never heard Black Sabbath before. My first association with this starts with, “What is this that stands before me?” This is like pure, Satanic Ennio Morricone! I’ve seen The Good, The Bad And The Ugly and Once Upon The Time In The West and in that film there’s this riff – ‘Harmonica Man’ – and it’s like so fucking dramatic and how can one guitar string cause so much motherfucking tension? And man, listening to ‘Black Sabbath’ and it’s practically that! It’s that approach with this amazing, jazzy kind of drumming. It’s so sophisticated; all that riffing without being a knucklehead. There is nothing for knuckleheads on this album and all the metal fans around me who didn’t know the album were like, “What is this, man?” and I’m like, “This is it!”

You can hear fingers sliding and this is an album where less is more. It will be forever a mystery if Morricone was an influence or not but timeline-wise I think it’s right in there.