Album Review: Slayer - Hell Awaits [40th Anniversary]
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
I’m going to start this review with the assumption that if you’re reading it you’re at least familiar with Slayer and their body of work, be that whole career or merely the later parts. For those of us old enough to remember hearing Slayer for the first time it was like nothing we ever heard before. They seemed to have taken the speed and spite of Venom and somehow turned it up even more than the Geordies had. The 1983 debut album, Show No Mercy, had Venom’s fixation on the darker side of life, tracks like Evil Has No Boundaries, Die by the Sword, Black Magic, and The Antichrist could have been interchangeable with material from Welcome to Hell et al.
The 1984 EP, Haunting the Chapel began to show signs of Slayer’s move toward a more familiar sound, which was fully realised on Hell Awaits, their sophomore full length where, as Kerry King is reported to have said: “Slayer became Slayer.”
If the previous two releases had shown songwriting coloured by Venom, it was fellow First Wave of Black Metal band, Mercyful Fate, who would influence Hell Awaits. Three of the seven songs exceed six-minutes in length and featured more progressive elements than the band had shown previously.
From the opening ritual of the title track’s demonic chanting –which was actually ‘Join us’ played in reverse – leading to the interlocking of all four elements musically coming together, to the diabolical carnage, sharp snappy vocals and thin production lending the whole thing an otherworldly feel, this is classic Slayer that stands up to anything the band have released since.
Tom’s bass creep and lurks just beneath the surface of At Dawn They Sleep’s tale of vampirism; Crypts of Eternity has the guitars low in the mix, but it all adds to the chilled atmospherics of the record.
More in keeping with the direction Slayer would follow from here, Kill Again has a grooving riff and some machine gun guitars, that start to sketch out the band’s sound going forward; Praise of Death is a simple but effective riff that allows King and Hanneman to experiment a little; Necrophiliac is more speed than thrash, with Tom’s bass tolling like a death bell. Hardening of the Arteries closes out the album with some dissonant snapping vocals and an outro that takes up right back to the start of the record and those dark choral chants of the opening section.
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Seismic for the mid-Eighties – this was a time when Glam & Hair Metal ruled the charts – Hell Awaits laid the groundwork for Reign in Blood’s game-changing appearance but a year later. The combination of King and Hanneman on guitar and Araya and Lombardo on rhythm duties was an unstoppable force back then, though only Hell Awaits itself would feature regularly in the band’s live sets going forward, with the occasional appearance of Necrophiliac and Kill Again.
This fortieth anniversary reissuing of Hell Awaits doesn’t mess around with the original mix from ’85, leaving Brian Slagel’s production and Bernie Grundman’s mastering as was back then to maintain the atmospherics of the day.
Available as either a three-vinyl version, including a sixty-page hard cover book, Hell Awaits presented on fire splatter coloured vinyl, a replica ticket, tour laminate and German tour poster, plus slip mat, posters and fliers. The three CD version also includes the book and poster, with the second and third CDs and vinyl being Slayer’s show at Zeche in Bochum, [then West] Germany on 18th June 1985.
By the time of this show, Hell Awaits had been in the record stores for a couple of months, and the eighteen-song set reflects the assumed familiarity with the album. All seven tracks get aired, scattered among Slayer’s dark past of Captor of Sin, Fight Till Death and The Final Command. In facteverything Slayer had recorded to that point was included in the Bochum show; the quality of the recording is rudimentary but shows a band in the first flushes of youth and making hay while the sun shines. Tom’s voice starts to show limitations by Die by the Sword and he seems to pin the band’s colours to Black Metal’s first wave in the intro of The Antichrist; but this is the roots of the juggernaut that would soon enough steamroller big stages for decades to come.
There will be a version of Hell Awaits’ 40th Anniversary Edition that doesn’t include the Bochum show and will be limited to 666 copies worldwide and available only through the fan club.
It was blast being able to sit and listen to Hell Awaits front to back again; like being reacquainted with an old school friend you’ve been meaning to call for years but something has always got in the way. In all honesty I don’t tend to reach for Slayer after Seasons in the Abyss whenever I’m in the mood for one of their albums, and I rarely go back to the early days either, sticking with Reign, South of Heaven or Seasons; I’d quite forgotten just how much I enjoyed Hell Awaits back then, and still enjoy it today.
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