Phantom Sound & Vision
1981
Welcome To Hell
About This Album
Welcome to Hell, and Venom themselves, for that matter, have long been the subject of heated debate within the heavy metal community. Few bands have been as recognizably influential yet so universally panned by critics during their careers, and, of course, it was this, their first long-player, which ignited most of that controversy in the first place. This shocking debut was the scene of a bloody, head-on collision between Black Sabbath's original heavy metal commandments and lyrical obsessions with all things demonic, and Motörhead's unparalleled distortion and breakneck speed. Make no mistake: Welcome to Hell, more than any other album, crystallized the elements of what later became known as thrash, death, black, and virtually every other form of extreme metal, serving as a primer for thousands of post-New Wave of British Heavy Metal teens to follow. Primitive with a capital "P," the album's production values are so poor, that, fittingly, Welcome to Hell truly sounds like it was recorded in a tomb, the band's Marshall stacks caked with dirt and oozing worms even as they tore through their material like a pack of speed freaks. It's not that the hellish triumvirate of bassist/growler Cronos, guitarist Mantas, and drummer Abaddon -- there, even the ghoulish names set a precedent -- were such incompetent musicians individually (OK, maybe Abaddon), but their performance as a unit often sounds clumsy and underrehearsed.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10 and 11)

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