Staff picks

I'm not going to go to the same effort that I did to mark the half-centenary of Black Sabbath, but I do think that Paranoid is the superior album by far - it was one of my first metal albums (mine and the rest of the world's) and it remains one of my favorites. The guitars, bass, and drums on this album are simply flawless, and the vocals are pretty good, too. I would tentatively say that heavy metal has not yet produced another work as instrumentally well-rounded and complete as "War Pigs." Every groove of this album is the very essence of metal incarnate, and while you are correct in noting that we mostly use the Staff Picks feature just to mark anniversaries nowadays, there are few albums worth celebrating as much as Paranoid. It boggles the mind to consider that this album has been in the world for 50 years and it is still looked upon as a masterpiece.