Snowblind

The album's centerpiece of slow dissolution — a track built on one of Iommi's most hypnotic and circular riffs, a figure that spirals without resolving, endlessly patient and endlessly dark. The tempo is midrange, neither the crawl of "Hand of Doom" nor the charge of "Supernaut," but something in between that locks into a narcotic groove. The production is notably thick, the guitars layered with a woolly, enveloping quality that gives the sound a physical warmth even as the subject matter is cold. Ozzy's vocal sits in a melancholic register throughout, less tortured than reflective, as though reporting from inside the experience described. The lyric uses cocaine as both subject and metaphor — the numbness, the artificial clarity, the winter palette of the high — and the music enacts the effect: pleasurable, repetitive, slightly disorienting, impossible to fully shake. This is Black Sabbath at their most genuinely psychedelic, the heaviness functioning less as aggression than as immersion. It suits the small hours of a gray morning, the tail end of something that started promisingly and ended in a fog you can't quite see through.