Iron Man

The riff that opens this arrives like something enormous dragging itself upright — Tony Iommi's descending chromatic figure, thick with tritone menace, preceded by that processed "I am Iron Man" vocal run through a ring modulator until it sounds like corroded metal speaking. Bill Ward's drums hit with a swinging heaviness that betrays the band's blues roots even at their most monolithic, and the mid-song acceleration into double-time boogie is one of hard rock's great structural surprises: the lumbering giant suddenly sprints. Ozzy Osbourne sings in his characteristic nasal keen, flat and eerie rather than powerful, which makes the narrative land as folk horror rather than bombast. The story is genuinely tragic science fiction — a man travels through time, sees the apocalypse, returns turned to steel and mute, is mocked by the people he tried to warn, and takes revenge that fulfills the very future he witnessed. It is a closed loop of cruelty and misunderstanding, written by working-class Birmingham men in a city of foundries and factory smoke, where heavy machinery was not metaphor but employment. Decades of appropriation by film franchises and sports arenas have sanded down how strange it is. Best heard loud in a car at night, or on headphones when you want music that moves at the pace of something that cannot be stopped.