I try to make a point of only buying physical music that I intend on playing at least once. But… sometimes something very interesting comes along and, well, I buy it even though I have no intention of actually playing it. I just can’t help myself (fact check –> I’m perfectly capable of not making these purchases… this is all on me and a lack of impulse control). And that is how I came to buy this little oddity the other day.
Last a few weeks ago we were in New York City and I had the opportunity to attend a record fair in Brooklyn – ironically the same record fair I attended on our last visit to NYC all the way back in 2018. What’s weird about this fair is it’s outdoors, and while the vendors were under tents, it was an 80+ degree day and… man, some of those boxes were just sitting there in the sun, which couldn’t have been a good thing. The seller of this record, however, was in the shade. I believe he was Eastern European based on his accent and how many of his records were Russian and Hungarian pressings and artists. This Black Sabbath record caught my eye and I assumed it was simply a different cover for the band’s 1970 self-titled debut, but when I looked at the track list… well, it wasn’t right.
The record has eight songs. Three are from Black Sabbath, while the other five are from their sophomore record Paranoid. It was put out by the Мелодия label, the long-time state label of the USSR, but I’m almost certain this post-Berlin-Wall-falling record (released in 1990) is unofficial. It’s also a bit of an odd selection of songs, at least to me – excluding “War Pigs” seems like a massive oversight, and I’m a bit surprised “The Wizard” wasn’t selected. It would have made more sense to simply go with the A side of each of the two records. I’ve seen a few posts out there on the interwebs about the quality of the album, with some saying its surprisingly good and others that its a bit flat. But one interesting observation from a number of Sabbath fans is that the channels are in fact reversed when compared to the official recordings, an interesting quirk (and one I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed).
For $17 I figured “why not”. This is a fun record to have, and maybe I’ll even play it someday.