Hell Awaits

Before I first got my hands on Slayer’s Hell Awaits back in the day, I had the live-in-the-studio album, Live Undead on tape, and it was the most evil sounding thing I’d heard up to that point in my life. Funnily enough, I only ended up with it by chance. I’d bought that and a Judas Priest album together, one to keep and one to give to my mate Spencer for his birthday, and I split them completely randomly. He ended up with the Judas Priest, and luckily for me, I got the Slayer. I remember buying the Hell Awaits CD from a music shop in Henderson on a Thursday night back in 1990, taking it home and cranking it up, presumably too loud, because Mum came through and told me to turn it down. Fair play to her, really. Between that random tape swap and this album, Slayer’s position as the most evil sounding band in my brain was pretty much cemented, at least until Dismember, Morbid Angel and Scandinavian black metal came along later.

Hell Awaits turns 40 this year, and Metal Blade have marked the occasion properly with a proper stack of reissues worth having a look at if you’re into the band’s early stuff. All four of Slayer’s ’80s albums have someone somewhere arguing they’re the best one. Show No Mercy diehards reckon it’s the purest expression of thrash before it got polished, Reign in Blood people will tell you nothing’s ever matched it for sheer speed and precision, and South of Heaven fans will point to it as the sound of the band maturing without losing any menace. But Hell Awaits is the one that gets me, and I reckon it’s because it captures the band mid transformation, the rougher edges of Show No Mercy giving way to something thicker and more original, right before they became the band everyone knows. It’s where Slayer became Slayer.
1985 was a big year for extreme metal more generally. Possessed and Sepultura were both stirring things up from the tape trading underground around the same time, but if you wanted something heavier and better recorded than this in ’85, you basically had to leave metal altogether. That’s the context this album sits in.

What’s actually on offer: The album’s been remastered and restored from the original tapes, and comes in a few different flavours depending on how deep you want to go. There’s a blood filled liquid vinyl for the real deep-pocketed diehards, a three CD book edition, a digital version, and then the big one, a three LP vinyl box set that’s clearly aimed at people who want the full nostalgia experience, not just the music, which is what I got.

What’s in the box: It’s fairly over the top, in the best way. Alongside the three vinyl records themselves, you get:

• A hardback book running to 60 pages, photos, liner notes, that sort of archival stuff
• A slipmat for your turntable
• Replica vintage gig ticket from the era
• Replica backstage pass
• Reproduction posters
• Reproduction flyers
• Reproduction newsletters from the period

The packaging is more about the whole ritual of owning the thing than just having the songs, which is exactly what I want from a 40th anniversary edition. Every version except the liquid vinyl also includes a previously unreleased 18 track live recording from a 1985 show in Bochum, Germany, which is honestly the real reason to bother with any of this.

On the album itself: The title track, my favourite, and always will be, has one of the great openings in metal. You get that minute long intro of backwards demonic chanting layered over squealing guitar noise and what sounds like souls screaming in the pit, and it’s the sort of thing black metal bands would later turn into a cliché, except none of them ever managed the groove Slayer pulls off here. Dave Lombardo steers the band through five separate riffs before the tempo shifts twice and the whole thing takes off into one of the fastest thrash tracks of the era. Tom Araya somehow makes all those dense, narrative lyrics land clearly even at that speed, which is more than can be said for a lot of the death metal growlers who came after. Really, this track is the blueprint for everything Reign in Blood would do a year later, and Hanneman and King’s dual guitar work here is on another level entirely, drawing on that NWOBHM dual lead tradition but taking it somewhere nobody else went.

“Kill Again” follows the same template, swarming riffs, pummelling drums, Araya letting out that high shriek of his, and it’s not far off the title track in quality. But “At Dawn They Sleep” is the other one that’s really stuck with me over the years. There’s a touch of reverb on Araya’s voice on that one that gives it this properly sepulchral quality, and it fits the vampire subject matter perfectly. Not every song on the record quite reaches those heights, you’ve got black magic, murder, and whatever “Necrophiliac” is meant to be about, but the whole thing works because of how relentless and concentrated it is rather than any real variety. The production gets called sludgy sometimes, but played loud, as intended, Mum’s objections notwithstanding, it’s dense and heavy without ever turning muddy. Everything cuts through where it needs to, and Lombardo’s kick drums will still rattle your windows if you let them.

On the Bochum live set: Recorded early in the band’s career, the setlist pulls from Show No Mercy, Hell Awaits, the Haunting the Chapel EP, and the standalone track “Aggressive Perfector,” which had turned up on a Metal Blade compilation a couple of years earlier. Instead of the usual backwards chanting intro, the crowd just starts chanting the band’s name before they launch into an even faster version of the title track than the studio one. Sound’s decent, if a touch rough round the guitars early on. The drums and vocals sit forward in the mix to begin with, and it takes a few tracks for the balance to properly settle, with the bass never quite loud enough for my liking, there’s a fair amount of tape hiss too, which reminds me of the old bootleg live demos I used to get back in the day tape trading.

What really makes it worth hearing is Araya’s stage presence. He’s got this affable, chatty energy live that’s completely absent from the studio records. His banter starts off fairly basic, asking the crowd if they’re all “aggressive perfectors” before tearing into that song, but he loosens up as it goes and you can hear him properly connecting with what sounds like a very drunk German audience. Lombardo turns in a standout performance on “Captor of Sin,” and the older Show No Mercy tracks get supercharged compared to their studio versions, genuinely approaching Reign in Blood levels of intensity by this point. “Kill Again” gets one of Araya’s more theatrical spoken intros too.

So if you’re already sold on the band, the takeaway seems to be: the remaster’s a nice touch, the box set trinkets are good fun if that’s your thing, but it’s that Bochum show that’s genuinely worth the money. Forty years on and Mum still would’ve told me to turn it down.