Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Venom - Welcome to Hell (1981)

Venom get way to little attention nowadays in my daily album listening.  As such I tend to forget how important they are in weaving the very fabric of extreme music that dominates my digital library as well as my physical copies that frequent the shelving in my lair.  By the time Venom released their debut we had already seen five Motörhead records, two Iron Maiden albums and nine Judas Priest records.  The numbers are important here, I don't just quote them for statistical purposes.  Of the seventeen albums cross the three bands mentioned, arguably Welcome to Hell was the most influential on the more extreme sub-genres of metal, taking the speed metal elements and sloppy songwriting and putting in the foundations for a whole new expansion of heavy metal in years to come.

Listen to this record and you can hear where Bathory got their vibe from; that murky sound, low production value, intense and adversarial attitude and a non-chalant, tongue-in -cheek undertone to it all.  Welcome to Hell is performed by three lads with no fucks to give, having a great laugh and perhaps unknowingly shaping the future of one of music's loudest and most obnoxious genres.  Going into this review I found a reissue with several demos, singles and outakes that takes the record to a twenty-two song Venomfest which I have gorged upon for the past two days.  Listening to some of the demo and outake tracks it is obvious that this was a band living their best life.  Writing deliberately provocative lyrics and noisy as fuck arrangements to maximise the shock factor.

And this is what needs to be taken way from the listening experience more than anything.  Forget for a minute how influential an album it is.  Put down the microscope and stop analysing what sub-genres and sub-cultures it created.  Instead appreciate it as a record full of unbridled and unrestrained aggressive metal passion, delivered by three young musicians with obvious but not excessive talent aimed at doing nothing more than enjoying a good time and not caring two shits who they pissed off in the process.