In celebration of Slayer’s upcoming new album World Painted Blood and tour, come inside for a classic review of their 1985 album Hell Awaits.

Classic Rock’s Geoff Barton writes:

As much as Slayer are revered today, people forget they were largely dismissed as a bunch of dubious death-metal jokers when their debut album Show No Mercy came out in summer 1984. Many found their Haunting The Chapel EP, released later that same year, to be equally laughable. But I was an early convert to the Californian band’s hyper-subversive sounds – because, at the end of the day, you can’t argue with sick minds. Or, indeed, extreme music at its most… extreme. Here, warts (especially warts) and all, is a review I wrote for Kerrang! in 1985 of Slayer’s second full-length album, Hell Awaits…

SLAYER
Hell Awaits
(Metal Blade MX 8020 import)
KKKKK*

I am a Slayer fan. It’s a sudden development, I know, and I dunno what caused this, exactly. In any case, I can’t be bothered to spend too much time analysing the reason behind this revolting development. All I know is that, one day not so long ago, I got sick and tired of wimping out. Pissed off with aiming for respectability. I got frustrated and began gasping for a death-breath of foetid air as the choking feather-pillow of blandness threatened to smother me.

So I went looking for an escape valve and found it in a screwed-up hi-fi, a jagged ol’ volume knob and an album by the name of Show No Mercy. Quick as you please, I became a Slayer fan.

Hell Awaits, the latest offering from Messrs Araya, Lombardo, Hanneman and King, is one helluva album. Forget the laughable Jesus & Mary Chain, Sisters Of Mercy et bloody al, Slayer are the ones to provide a real shock to a static nervous system. To paraphrase the gonzoid Godz, Slayer are the people your parents always warned you about…

Honestly, I reckon they’re the most threatening, subversive band on the surface of the planet at this particular moment in time. Hell Awaits is the product of sick minds. It reeks of evil intent and rattles your walls with its fuck-’em-all frenzy. It’s a horrifying, frightening album; homicidal heaviness and maniacal brain-power spewed into a vile cauldron of bubbling Sabbath entrails and mutilated Motörhead corpses; cracked, simian skulls floating on the steaming, soup-like surface of the toxic mixture, grinning at you with fear-frozen expressions, long-decayed teeth jutting out at angles like yellowing, tumbledown tombstones…

A cursory glance at the inner bag and the clumsy, misspelled lyrics is enough to send a seismic shiver down your quaking spine. Try ‘No apparent motive/Just kill and kill again/Survive my brutal thrashing/I’ll hunt you to the end/My life’s a constant battle/The rage of many men/Homicidal maniac…’ for size, or read ‘Running and hunting and slashing and crushing and searching and seeing and stabbing and shooting and thrashing and smashing and burning destroying and killing and bleeding and pleading then death…’ and decide for yourself whether or not these words were written by someone deranged.

And yet, beneath it all, beyond the terror, the killing and the death, there exists an excellent band. Slayer can play, and some of their mighty riffs and devious death-metal arrangements border, to these Kerrang!-ed kauliflower ears, on genius! Slayer have the speed, yet they also have the suss and wherewithal to slow down and grind; grind like a nefarious necromancer using a pestle and mortar to reduce a dead baby’s bones to fine dust, grind like Iommi in his Warning heyday, grind like a… well, you’ve probably got the picture by now, haven’t you?!

Hard as it may be for some to believe, there is variety and, yes, intelligence present in Slayer’s work. Opening with the upwards-fading Exorcist gutturals of the title track, a genuinely disturbing six minutes, 12 seconds of riff-laden insanity, Hell Awaits immediately opens its monstrous bloody maw and mercilessly swallows the listener whole.

The murderous Kill Again, the venomously vampiric At Dawn We Sleep, the suicidal Praise Of Death, the sex-with-the-dead terror of Necrophiliac, the deathly descent into the Crypts Of Eternity… all these terrifying toons surge by as you journey inexorably down the album’s heaving oesophagus, into its rumbling stomach and through its acrid digestive system until you are finally expelled through the stinkin’ arse of Side Two closer Hardening Of The Arteries.

What more is there to say other than to mention that this is the kinda music that makes you wanna go… “GREEEE-ARRRGH!!!!” ’Nuff said!

*Maximum rating, i.e. Kolossal!