METAL MESSIAHS #4: VENOM – WELCOME TO HELL
Buzz Drainpipe, The Discarded I
“Like someone taped over a Motörhead bootleg with a ritual and left it in a graveyard overnight.”
There are albums that refine the genre. Then there are albums that detonate it.
Welcome to Hell isn’t just a debut—it’s a summoning. Released in 1981, this molten cassette of satanic distortion and guerrilla production doesn’t politely ask for a place in metal’s pantheon. It kicks the damn doors in, drenched in goat’s blood, snarling in Geordie accents, and cackling through a cloud of dry ice and sulfur.
Where Judas Priest sanctified metal and Twisted Sister glamorized it, Venom desecrated it. Welcome, dear readers, to the heretics’ hymnbook.
🔥 The Sound: Bile, Speed, & Blasphemy
Imagine if Black Sabbath got blackout drunk on bathtub gin and tried to play Ace of Spades in double-time while screaming through a grave robber’s mic.
That’s Welcome to Hell.
It’s sludgy. It’s sloppy. It’s sacred.
Tracks like “Witching Hour,” “Live Like an Angel (Die Like a Devil),” and the title track are barely held together by production glue—but that chaos is the alchemy. This record feels cursed. The speed is frantic, the riffs are neolithic, and Cronos’s vocals? Pure necro-gargoyle.
This isn’t music—it’s a weaponized snarl.
👹 The Doctrine:
Venom didn’t invent Satanic metal, but they branded it like cattle. The pentagrams, the hellish font, the spoken-word invocations—it all drips with comic book evil, but behind the schlock is an instinctual understanding: metal needed a villainous catharsis. Venom were that catharsis. They were Sabbath with a switchblade. KISS with rabies. A garage band possessed.
And they didn’t care about virtuosity. Their playing was brute-force. Their songs were incantations shouted over collapsing structures. That was the point.
☠️ Why It’s Metal Messiah #4:
Because Welcome to Hell is the sound of extremity being born. Thrash, death, black metal—they all owe Venom a ritual tithe.
Because this record made kids in 1981 terrified and curious.
Because it said: you don’t need to be perfect—you just need to be possessed.
Because it put metal back in the alleyway with a spike-studded bat and a grin.
And because when Buzz Drainpipe first dropped the needle on it in a stolen van outside Worcester, he saw God—and God was screaming.
—
No comments:
Post a Comment