Venom - Founding Extreme Metal

With Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate and Metallica, Venom are, for this writer, among the ten most important metal bands of all time. But they're also among the most revolutionary of all rock bands. Venom didn't jump on a movement, Venom created one. Venom weren't children, they were only fathers. Like Motorhead and Black Sabbath.

Like Motorhead, Venom were English (formed in Newcastle in the late '70s). Like Motorhead, they were a trio (with the bassist, like Lemmy, also singing). And like Motorhead, they had nothing to do with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement; if anything, they emerged in opposition to it. English metal was, and quintessentially identified with, the NWOBHM: indeed Motorhead and Venom have little in common with typical English metal, which would bear its ripest fruit with Iron Maiden, who institutionalized classic heavy metal. Instead, Motorhead and Venom anticipated the main strands of '80s metal: thrash/speed, death and black metal. Venom played with the same violence established in the Motorhead era, but set within Black Sabbath-like atmospheres and adopting Kiss's aesthetic in a pseudo-satanic version. This is why they are the fathers of extreme metal, though we'd have to wait for the technical-sonic revolution of Metallica, Slayer and Celtic Frost, as well as the formalization of black metal by Quorthon's Bathory and of death metal by Chuck Schuldiner's Death, to actually get there.

Like Black Sabbath, Venom presented themselves as a “concept” band. As with Black Sabbath, the theme was occultism, satanism, a perversion within that realm that amounted to a perversion around the theme of violent, bewitched death. Like Black Sabbath, they had an aesthetic and conducted public relations that were, to put it mildly, ridiculous. But like Kiss, and on Kiss's level more than Black Sabbath's, they did it to sell records. All the antics on back covers or backstage were done to sell and to market themselves to more or less grown-up satanically-obsessed kids; because otherwise, musically, like all the great bands who know how to separate commerce from art (as happened, for instance in the same scene, with Mercyful Fate), Venom were entirely focused on existence and serious reflection. Some of the lyrics and certain naive studio gimmicks should also be traced back to the use of satanism as a marketing tool. But even more properly and more generally, they were a means to an end that, as with Black Sabbath despite all their transfigurations, was eminently tied to reflections on life. This is why Venom are classics, and why their art is far less trashy than that of today's bands that merely ape their sound. Venom flaunted death continuously, but they did so to express content concerning life. Today's copycat bands express absolutely nothing. Venom are a sort of Black Sabbath-thrash, just as Mercyful Fate are a sort of Black Sabbath-power. For both, the rule holds of using Black Sabbath for the aesthetics of form, while thrash's violence and power metal's speed serve to express those same forms within an overall content marked by self-destructive violence. Moving from the music to the individual, this violence tends to signify a fundamental cosmic law. From 1980 to 1983, Venom were, alongside Motorhead, the most extreme band on Earth.

Just as with the wardrobe and stage props (daggers, cartridges, axes, bibles to burn, chains), Venom chose themselves insipid, ridiculous nicknames (many love metal and many hate it for things like this, proving that both camps understand nothing about the genre). Just as the lyrics and the various stage choreographies and all the other purely extrinsic devices conceal content concerning everyone's life, so these pathetic, petty names present revolutionary, uncompromising musicians and composers: consider that they challenged and renounced the then well-paid NWOBHM scene and created a new metal “New Wave” that, though born in the homeland of the old one, would find its developments abroad, in America and Scandinavia. Abaddon's drumming was as devastating as Phil Taylor's in Motorhead, and like no one else's at the time (and with it, and for this reason, a father of Metallica's thrash metal). Mantas's guitar was as powerful as Motorhead's Eddie Clark's, but replaced his more blues-inflected runs with rhythmic machine-gun bursts (and by reinventing rhythm guitar, by denying the solo, Mantas is effectively the first thrash metal guitarist). The leader, Cronos, is then one of the most important personalities in all of metal, since both in his murderous bass playing and his powerfully hoarse voice he draws on Lemmy, yet tinges this foundation with Mephistophelian, sadomasochistic tones; he also anticipates, by several years, the typical death metal device: that phlegmy, modulated rasp that would become the “growl” (almost always tedious in those who came after), as if he had a “rat in his throat.” Cronos is also the first metal vocalist to not sing but scream, often incomprehensibly and, at least apparently, disregarding all technique so as to give greater emphasis to extreme states of panic, dissolution and pain. It's hard to overstate Venom's historical greatness. Before Metallica delivered the final coup de grace, Venom destroyed centuries of songs and melodies, centuries of unfulfilled violence: they violated centuries of impotence.

Venom deserve a discussion all their own. For their first three classic albums, the concept of the song, meaning the quality of its composition, takes a back seat: it is the execution and the content emerging from that execution that make the revolution and carry immense importance. From a compositional standpoint, few Venom “songs” merit high praise, yet their first three albums must be considered classics of rock as a whole, representing not only the warning sign and, in part, the first actualization of the metal that was to come (thrash, death, black), but already constituting templates for the variants of what was then a future rock genre. The average length of a Venom track is three and a half minutes: as with much extreme metal; unlike classic heavy metal, speed metal and power metal, which all have longer tracks. It's no coincidence that the most direct influence on thrash and death metal is hardcore punk.

Welcome To Hell (1981) 39 minutes, 11 tracks.

“Sons of Satan” [3:37] was already a revolution for its time: the most extreme Motorhead tinged with the grimmest black: speed, power, distortion. A track that's still devastating today. Powerful sound in a fatalistic, deathly, inhuman effect. Raw, total screams like those of the fiercest Black rhythm and blues or rock 'n' roll singers (one above all: Little Richard). Venom are not a classic metal band (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden), Venom create a new metal classicism (thrash) made possible by their knowledge not only of Black Sabbath and Motorhead, but also, and sometimes above all, of MC5 and Velvet Underground (the latter a heresy for all of traditional hard rock)

"Welcome to Hell" [3:13] rationalizes that preceding supreme chaos; it then introduces an initial chorus with a synthesizer echo later copied and re-copied by all metal to come. Finally, a robotic female voice surprises and further estranges the magma over which an unstoppable drum roll rises. No guitar solos, no slackening of tension, no compromise, no boredom.

"Schizoid" [3:30] is once again a headlong blow: on one hand it establishes another theme that would later become common in metal (madness as a condition intrinsic to the world), on the other it proves inimitable for its atmosphere, obsessively steeped in existential dread. It stuns with the sincerity of Cronos's screams, and with a rhythm section that is among the most naturally depressed and effective of all time. Given these terms, what's actually being played largely becomes secondary. It's a continuous gust of wreckage blown out from destruction.

"Poison" [4:30] borrows its title (and not only that) from Motorhead, showing how their music can bend to narrate the darkest, most apocalyptic states. It's an untameable rattling of carcasses that seem unable to dissolve. The guitar parts, even when they appear to launch into solos, actually negate them from within through enormous distortions, speed-ups or slow-downs, always under the banner of a chaotic unintelligibility that nevertheless manages to emerge as a granite-like, compact wall.

"Live Like an Angel" [3:58] persists in an essential baroque style that suffocates not from inconsistency but from too much consistency - not because it says too little, but because it says too much, demanding great effort to be pared down, if it even can be. In the middle there's a Black Sabbath-style doom riff, later picked up many times by various metal bands. The guitar harmonies are obsessive to the point of becoming disharmonies. This, like all true rock music, is music recorded live in one take, with minimal means - not only fully adaptable live, but actually more effective and better suited to the stage than to the studio.

"Witching Hour" [3:40] lets us notice how, purely because of the limited recording and mixing techniques of the era, these tracks today both are and are not the most extreme and powerful ever composed. The quintessence of heavy metal, two years ahead of Metallica (and Metallica without Venom would be unthinkable, just as Venom without Motorhead would be). Through sheer excess of ferocity and speed, through excess of everything, it could almost be experienced as slowness, or as nothing at all.

"One Thousand Days in Sodom" [4:35] opens with an immensely heavy guitar slash, continues with the usual tank-like rhythm of dry death, without ever letting interest or engagement drop for a single moment. Venom's credibility and sincerity truly belong to very few bands. Reality is told through horror-satanic fables, making it more hallucinatory but no less tremendously true. The ending brings the experimental side that, with minimal means, Venom always plant here and there - if not in the very skeleton of their songs, then above all in the utterly singular way only Venom have of playing: dark electric acidity, putrefying rhythms, and vocals catchy just enough to make the perpetual deafness all the more lacerating.

"Angel Dust" [2:39] shows how incredible it is that, while Venom (with titles and lyrics like this one) paved the way for thousands of imitators, they nonetheless seem - as only the greats do - to carry it off as if it weren't really them doing it, as if their mission were something else, something more important than art itself: the existential message, precisely.

"In League With Satan" [3:31] is a Viking-like tribalism valid for every age, as slow as it is heavy: Satan (or what he represents) is the trait d'union between the various ages of a humanity that, whatever it may do, is always and only Satan himself, and remains in the hands of Satan himself. Without Venom, Type O Negative would be impossible. Compared with the fathers, one understands why the sons are necessarily inferior.

"Red Light Fever" [5:14] is the final masterpiece, a metal "Sister Ray": disharmonies, tempo changes, extremism that at times even anticipates the enormous excesses of the Melvins; Venom seem to have no boundaries, seem to have been able, with just this first album alone, to say everything there was and could ever be said in metal: and moreover without anthems, perhaps even without songs - or precisely for that reason: they said everything because they handed down a stave, a musical staff from which one cannot escape: just as the seven notes are present in every song, so Venom are present in every form of metal, and are all the more essential and revolutionary precisely because, like all essential and revolutionary things, what gets picked up from them is not (only or mainly) a riff, a title or a song, but the very art of making music.

Black Metal (1982) 40 minutes, 11 tracks.

"Black Metal" [3:40]: the title says it all, the title says that Venom didn't so much found death metal (beyond, and partly alongside, thrash and speed metal - for that we have Death, from '86 onward) but rather black metal (which from '84 onward would be carried forward admirably by Bathory), a genre closer to thrash than to death, more rock'n'roll (of which it's nothing but an extreme transfiguration) and less industrial, a genre less maniacal and inhuman (usually less contrived), more pliable and thus more touching and lacerating (more sincere and existential: death metal's programmatic belch often ends up seeming gratuitous) - while bearing in mind that black metal is the father of death metal, and that death metal is merely a further exasperation of the dark, pushed to the point of the non-song and the unintelligibility of lyrics. The track in question overflows with tremendous, desolate effectiveness, always powerful, never flagging, always gripping in its damnation. A supreme vocal performance from Cronos: in the finale he's left almost alone, tormenting those last scraps of universe remaining after the furious sonic charge that preceded it. This song and those that follow make this album Venom's most perfect and most exemplary - and therefore, however, their least experimental. Let this serve to show that all three of Venom's first albums, for different reasons (as revolution, as institution, and as elaboration), demand the utmost attention.

"To Hell and Back" [3:00]: once again we're faced with a mammoth episode - even catchy, in fact: more sentimental and less programmatic (as experimentation always is), then. A slow track by Venom's standards, where the guitar once again rises to a venerable originality, in part still unsurpassed in metal (it's as if you can hear Reed's rawest, most essential distortions melted down into metal).

"Buried Alive" [4:16] confirms the band's state of utterly calculated possession: for Venom, everything seems easy: they make and unmake a genre, communicating enormous, extreme existential content as if it were the most natural thing in the world - a sign of the trio's great sincerity, great inspiration, passion and commitment. Venom seem to ignore music itself, using it merely as a soundtrack or even a secondary element; the fact is that, in doing so, they bring an irreversible revolution to popular music. Another slow track, dark as - or darker than - Black Sabbath, yet rawer, more visceral: more cosmic and extreme, more physical than hallucinatory or witchy.

"Raise the Dead" [2:45] only slightly increases the speed; what matters in these last three tracks is depth and oppressiveness. The line "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," along with its melody, would later be copied by Metallica.

"Teacher's Pet" [4:41] returns to Motorhead-style violence, though first channeled into a chorus and then stretched into a chaotic solo; meanwhile there are interludes of voices like a Viking war band; then it starts up again with all the deflagrating, unstoppable force of exploding dynamite.

"Leave Me in Hell" [3:33] is typical of the Venom mold, it's Motorhead, it's extreme, it's gripping, and dark and irredeemable, as it declares "I don't wont to be born".

"Sacrifice" [4:27] packs the title refrain with crushing violence, simplifying and giving a center to compositions that usually, as in the more artistic Venom, lack one; given its immediacy and simplicity it would become a blueprint for every future metal band.

"Heaven's on Fire" [3:40]: it opens with a long grunt and then shows how these tracks were recorded almost entirely live: it is a live take, and it conveys all the despair and the inevitability of death. It's from this track, with its tragic life strategy built on bitter and violent irony about one's own afflictions, that Megadeth would draw in particular. Once again crucial is the guitar, always lurking in the background as if suffocated, screeching and murmuring riff after riff that, where intelligible, make the history of future metal.

"Countess Bathory" [3:44] is the best track on this album and the best Venom track ever (though it could be argued that the best Venom isn't found in the songs, but in the noise-driven pieces that take up ample space on the first and third albums). An infernal and nostalgic track, a cursed and compassionate track, furious, explosive, melodic: the only Venom love song, a devastating and devastated love, yet certainly not lacking in emotion, sensitivity and transcendence. Cronos's voice ranks among the most expressionistic ever. It's ragged, it howls crudely, but for those who know how to look, it conceals a sensitivity that most singer-songwriters could only dream of.

"Don't Burn the Witch" [3:20] is high-school metal once again: just the two opening guitar riffs say it all: shattered and arrogant at once, and pretty much everyone would end up building on them. The track then continues with a Motorhead-like sound reined in by too much pain, too much despair and ultimate powerlessness. Cronos frightens or moves listeners not because he screams terrifyingly, but because his screams can't help but sound sincere and real.

At War With Satan (1983) 39 minuti, 6 brani.

"At War With Satan" [20:01] is the first example of a metal suite in history (Rush had already attempted something similar on 2112, but theirs was more progressive hard rock). This is the finest example. Few rock tracks beyond the 4-minute mark manage not to bore. This track is among those rock pieces capable of reaching the 20-minute peak without flagging, meandering, wasting time or losing interest. Always violent, always fast, always different, always beyond the limit of human tolerance for pain. This epic, this immolation of the Venom frontman, is an essential forge for anyone wanting to make metal. An album unto itself. And an album superior to anything bands like Type O Negative ever managed in their entire career, a decade later, when they tried to revive its values and forms. An original synthesis of Motorhead, Black Sabbath, MC5 and Velvet Underground. Few other metal bands can boast such apparently irreconcilable reference points.

"Rip Ride" [3:08] is yet another Motorhead-esque excess, with a particularly explosive rhythm section and Cronos's screams more disheartened than ever (echoed by Metallica's "Whiplash"). The guitar parts (which oddly feature tightrope-walking scales) are among the earliest examples of speed metal in history.

"Genocide" [3:58] gives no respite and crashes down on whatever was still standing or still alive. Once again different melodies, once again no room for boredom, once again a fabric steeped in damned and condemned life, once again a noose ready to strangle: all within the same solution of violence.

"Cry Wolf" [4:18] is a strange and highly original epic lament: the same acidic rhythm guitars, the same leaden, dark rhythm section, the same monstrously human voice, manage to achieve what only happens with classics: making the same essential, fatal message always sound different. The track's creative wordiness even leaves room for hints of Iron Maiden, industrial compressions and flashes of a highly idiosyncratic hard rock.

"Stand Up (And Be Counted)" [3:28] combines an instrumental fabric that already foreshadows doom metal with Cronos's powerful, raspy throat, whose tonal leaps can only mark him out as the David Thomas of heavy metal, of black metal.

"Women Leather and Hell" [3:19] renders harmless what would later become the rhythmic-melodic surges of Megadeth. Venom continue to prove themselves among the very few bands essential to metal. That not only the public but also critics have failed to notice this can only be discouraging.

"Aaaaargghh" [2:21], far from being a joke, is an experimental, cannibalistic metal-fusion: disco rhythms, death-metal screams, thrash beatdowns all at once. A summa of Venom's technical and compositional stature.

In 1983 Venom delivered their final masterpiece. In 1983 Venom's legacy was picked up by Metallica, who pushed the thrash of Motorhead and Venom to its extreme consequences, and by evolving it invented speed metal, thus marking the almost definitive arrival point of heavy metal.

When Venom returned to the scene in 1985 (Possessed) they were no longer the same band: meaning that the world was no longer the same, after they had helped change it, after they had spawned Metallica. In 1987 Calm Before The Storm (without the original guitarist, and with a track title that reads like a retroactive manifesto: "punk-metal" — what else is thrash, really?), in 1989 Prime Evil (with only the drummer left to carry the Venom banner), in 1991 Temples Of Ice, in 1992 The Waste Lands, all testify only to the fact that the passage from fathers to grandfathers inevitably renders one either ridiculous or irrelevant. Resurrection (2000) and Beauty And The Beast (2000) speak for themselves, and in that sense offer solid confirmation of the verdict one can already predict for Darkest Hour (2004).

On Metal Black (2006), standouts include the opener "Antechrist", groovy, gripping and devastating, as are "Burn In Hell", "House Of Pain" and "Rege Satanas", all spontaneous, engaging and fluid songs with Venom running and marching at full throttle. But the rest of the tracklist has an underlying flatness that keeps the album from fully taking flight. The blame falls undoubtedly on those tracks that, with the best intentions, aim to convey anguish, pain and darkness, but end up simply boring the listener, ultimately amounting to mere filler.

Evidently the usual, drastic lineup change has ruined everything once again. Cronos survived this time, and it would be wrong not to point out that his voice still sounds as deliciously sulfurous as ever, but a good record isn't just that — it's the sum of many factors, which here often fail to come together. Some fans will appreciate this return to the old sound, helped along by a dirty, deep and powerful production, but Metal Black manages neither to bring back a past that no longer exists, nor to breathe new life into it.

Contributions by Andrea Benedetti (“Musicboom“)

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