Band's List Black Heavy Venom Black Metal

It was while I was on a trip to New York City a while ago that I came across a record store that was not like anything I've ever seen in the town I came from. Metal poured from the store speakers, and not just obligatory/mainstream stuff like AC/DC, Korn, Metallica and whatnot, but nitty-gritty underground Black Metal, ugly death metal, and even drone. Long story short, I snapped up the Back on Black repressing of Venom's infamous cult classic 'Black Metal'.

Upon getting it home, I was in the middle of vomiting my guts up, but I didn't care. I put this baby on my turntable and listened to it while vomiting into a bucket. If that's not 'kvlt' than I don't know what is. Real horrorshow.

Now, I own the vinyl edition that consists of the Black Metal album, with a bonus extra disc that features bonus tracks of older Venom material. I'm going to skip reviewing that latter and focus on the main meat of the album, despite the extra disc being pretty badass. Anyway...
Venom's Black Metal was an exciting and somtimes goofy romp through booze-swilling satanic metal passages accompanied by comical vocals about the undead, Satan, and... eating out your teacher. MMMMMMMMM boy. The sounds of the album is full of grinding, primitive guitars that sound like giant machinery churning and chugging, blasting off wild solos on every second song or so, and it's always a treat when they do break into solo, although the solos aren't as common as one might first expect. It's as if the band doesn't want to spoil and overdo them, which I think makes them all the more special. The drums are... drums. They keep the pace of the song, they keep timing efficiently, they do their job, but they don't go above and beyond and knock you off their feet with anything flashy. They're just kinda... there. But not to worry, there's plenty that makes up for that little flaw. When the vocals come in (unfortunately drowning out the guitars for the most part), you can see where Venom's power came from back in the day. His vocals, completely atypical to the operatic sopranos of metal from the 80s, are pretty much grunted, gargly singing. Drunken chanting comes in every once in a while (the halfway point in Teacher's Pet being the most blatant example of this), giving you a strong sense of juvenile immaturity throughout the album, but it's never irratating. It's all good headbanging fun, and it's damn catchy too.

We start Black Metal off with the classic title track, which begins with a strange mechanical hissing sound, like a giant engine letting off steam (furnaces of Hell?). New York then the grinding guitars come in, and soon you're caught in a swirl of simply-written balls-to-the-wall metal as Cronos shouts the classic tagline: "LAY DOWN YOUR SOUL FOR THE GODS ROCK AND ROLL!" New York from there the album is pretty much relentless, the only real break being at the beginning of 'Buried Alive', where a deep-voiced Cronos gives the last rites ('Dust to dust, ashes to ashes', and all that) alongside the sound of dirt being dug up with a shovel. After that the guitars come in quiet, Cronos whispers a passage, and then the horns-out metal assault comes right back again.

The only thing that I find lacking here is variation and song structure. The song on here--all of them--are blatantly simple, not really going out further than the typical verse chorus song and dance. There're a couple of structure variants in a couple songs (an extended solo section in Teacher's Pet and the slow, quiet intro to Buried Alive that I mentioned before), but other than that, the songs are quite primitive musically. I guess that's what this album is about--straitforward metal with little range, but consistent power and presence--but a little deviation from this formula somewhere in the album would have improved it. New York don't get me wrong, this album is by no means monotonous. In fact, it's never boring. It's always a fun blast of the nitty-gritty metal that would later spawn Slayer and Bathory among others, and there is variation to be found here in tone. For example, songs such as Black Metal are dark and ugly, Buried Alive has a distinct spiteful gloominess to it, even after the intro finishes up, and songs like Raise the Dead and Heaven Shall Burn are in-your-face rockers. The songs lack structure and expansion, sure, but the album's general dynamicism makes up for most of that.

Of course, I also can't dismiss this album's influence. It broke into what would be the first extreme metal, and one of the last significant satan-based albums that don't look at satan and all his bells and whistles with a tongue-in-cheek disposition. This was completely new, a landmark of heavy metal, and you can feel the essence of a classic dripping from the meat of the grinding guitar riffs that imprint into your mind like they were burned there by Satan's pitchfork, the maniacal country-bumpkin vocals spitting blasphemies at you, and the general rolling in-your-face atmosphere of the whole thing. This is and was a groundbreaking album, and I'm sure it amazed the metalheads of the day that only knew of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. A new wave of metal was poised to strike evil into the heart of what metal existed already--things were changing, and this album was arguably the forerunner of it all. Pick this baby up if you want a taste of classic, straightforward, fun metal, but if you're into the more sophisticated technical metal, you may be turned off. My favorite songs off Black Metal would be Don't Burn the Witch, Buried Alive, and Countess Bathory. Those are the songs that have the most power and presence on the album, the ones that gut you and smack you upside the head with their unforgiveable Fire.