Review by Sonny for Slayer - Hell Awaits (1985)

Hell Awaits was the very first Slayer album I bought as I expanded my thrash metal awareness beyond Metallica's first two albums. It is probably my least favoured of their first three albums. I love the youthful exuberance of the debut (and it contains The Antichrist) and Reign in Blood is the greatest thrash album ever. But even despite that, Hell Awaits is still a fucking top-tier thrash metal release and most bands can only dream of producing something this awesome. 

When first listening to it all those decades ago it was, without doubt, the darkest album I had ever heard, with lyrics about hell, demons, serial killers and vampires, not in some tongue-in-cheek, Hammer Horror, camp-it-up style, but in red raw, visceral glee. Being the time, in the UK at least, of the video nasty laws banning "extreme" horror videos, it was hard to believe this was even allowed! Hell Awaits was most assuredly the biggest knee in the bollocks to the shiny glamour of the new romantics, hair metal and stadium rock that was proliferating in the mid-eighties and sowed the seeds, both musically and thematically, for much of the extreme metal that was to follow. This was most definitely an album and a band I could get behind.

Funnily, for a band as direct and in-your-face as Slayer, some of their most awesome tracks have an extended intro. I'm thinking Seasons in the Abyss, Raining Blood and, most pertinent to this review, the opener and title track, Hell Awaits, with the faded-in build-up and sinister backwards chanting of the intro. When the riff breaks and things begin in earnest, Tom Araya spills out words of an impending conquering of heaven by the hordes of hell, as if he was some old testament prophet in the throes of delivering demonically-inspired prophecy, fighting to impart the visions he has seen in a flurry of verbiage he can barely control. Add to this the increased intensity of guitarists Hanneman and King, their riffs bludgeoning metalheads worldwide insensible even as their solos left behing trails of blistering flesh, so white-hot were they. This was the first time I had heard solos so intense that it seemed like the Slayer duo had weaponised the art to the point that it could cause physical harm! Drummer Dave Lombardo had also grown exponentially in stature and confidence, although his tour-de-force was still an album away, and he and Araya's (very prominent) bass underpin and punctuate the two six-stringer's lethal assaults.

I think it is safe to say that this is an underappreciated album, which I am as guilty of as anyone. It feels like a quantifiably superior album to Show No Mercy with better performances, songwriting and production, yet I have a fondness for the debut that, irrationally, I don't feel for Hell Awaits on the same level - even whilst recognising it as a great album nonetheless. People are just weird I guess.