Welcome To Hell - Venom

Welcome to Hell- Venom ============= Venom is regarded as the fathers to black metal; when in reality they were a New Wave of Heavy Metal band with black metal 'imagery'; any metal band today, you can trace it back to its origins: Venom. That is how much Venom in its early days influenced the entire metal world. The three main bands at the time- Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and Motorhead was doing their music and Venom just blew them away in terms of creativity and speed, and paved the way for new bands to come along later. All bands afterwards (in death, thrash and black metal) took its raw intensity and aggressiveness influence from Venom and put their ...  Read the complete review

Welcome to Hell is a superb debut album by Venom. Released in January 1981 on Neat Records, it brought a whole new meaning to heavy metal as this Newcastle NWOBHM band produced the hardest album with the darkest material to date at that time. Even now, it doesn't sound tame and still comes across as hard albeit incredibly raw. The producing is poor and the musicians are quite sloppy at times but this just adds to the devil spawn that is Welcome to Hell. This album is often described as the first Black Metal album (although the band's 2nd album coined the term) but where it betters later albums is that it has catchy punk elements to the music and ...  Read the complete review