One man, playing almost everything himself, in Ottawa, on a debut that arrived fully formed from a band which barely existed as a band. Alice in Hell raised the standard for guitar writing in this genre and it did it from a country that most accounts of thrash mention twice.
Jeff Waters
Waters wrote the material, played the rhythm guitars, played the leads, played most of the bass, and had a substantial hand in the engineering. Annihilator has always been his project with personnel attached, and the line up has changed more times than anybody has usefully counted.
What that produced on the debut is unusual coherence. There is no compromise between writers because there is only one, and every part of the arrangement serves the same intention.
What the record does
Alice in Hell is technically demanding without being difficult to listen to, which is the balance the technical wing of this genre almost never struck. The riffs are intricate and they are also memorable; the solos are extremely fast and they are also constructed rather than sprayed.
Randy Rampage's vocal, from a punk background with D.O.A., adds an edge that a conventional metal singer would not have brought, and the contrast between the wildness of the delivery and the precision of the playing is a substantial part of why the album works.
The subject matter is domestic horror rather than war or damnation: institutions, abuse, madness, and things that happen indoors. That gives it a specificity that most thrash lyrics of 1989 did not have.
The follow up
Never, Neverland in 1990 is bigger, cleaner, better produced and, by a substantial minority of listeners, the better album. Coburn Pharr sings on it, the writing is more ambitious, and it arrived at exactly the moment the genre's commercial window was closing.
What followed was a career of considerable length, wildly variable quality and a permanent line up problem, in which Waters has at various points sung, played bass, produced and managed the band himself. He remains one of the best guitarists this music has produced and one of the least reliably served by his own discography.
| Alice in Hell | Never, Neverland | |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1989 | 1990 |
| Label | Roadrunner | Roadrunner |
| Singer | Randy Rampage | Coburn Pharr |
| Strength | Edge and coherence | Writing and production |
| Weakness | Rough in places | Arrived a year too late |
Why Canada kept producing these
Three bands from one country got there before or alongside the Americans and none of them got the credit: Exciter in Ottawa, Anvil in Toronto and Voivod in Jonquiere, with Annihilator, Razor and Sacrifice behind them.
The common factor is proximity without integration. Canadian bands could hear everything the American scene produced, tour into it, and get signed by American labels, and they were never part of any of the four scenes that the histories are written about. That gave them the information without the house style, which is the condition that produces originality everywhere else in this story as well.
Where it sits
Alongside Rust in Peace as the benchmark for what a guitarist can do inside a thrash arrangement without turning the record into an exercise. It is also the strongest argument available that the technical wing did not have to be cold.
The other Canadian claim, and the earliest one, is Exciter's "Heavy Metal Maniac", and the wider account of the genre outside America is in Brazil, Canada and the Rest of the World.
The line up problem
Annihilator has had something in the region of thirty members, which is a number that requires explanation rather than a joke.
Waters writes everything, plays most of it, produces and increasingly sings, so the other positions are effectively contract work rather than membership. Singers in particular have come and gone with each record, and the band's identity has therefore rested entirely on the guitar.
The cost is that the catalogue is inconsistent in a way the writing is not. A listener working through it chronologically will find albums that are simply a different band, and the standard advice is to take the first two, the 2010 self titled record and then sample.
What Waters actually does
Worth being technical for a paragraph, because his reputation as a shredder undersells the interesting part.
The riffs are built from short, tightly constructed figures that repeat with variation rather than from long sequences, which makes them unusually memorable for music this technical. The rhythm playing is exceptionally clean, with a right hand that does not degrade across a take. And the solos are composed rather than improvised, with a structure that returns to a theme.
That combination is why Alice in Hell is technical thrash that people actually play for pleasure, as opposed to technical thrash that people admire and put away.
How it was recorded
On a small budget, with Waters engineering a substantial part of it himself, which explains both the record's virtues and its rough edges.
The guitars are tight and dry and slightly thin, in the way a record made by a guitarist rather than a producer tends to be: the instrument he cared about is perfectly placed and everything else sits behind it. The drums are functional. The bass is barely there.
None of that matters much, because the writing carries it, and the roughness has aged considerably better than the expensive, gated, over compressed productions of the same period. A record that documents what somebody actually played is more durable than one that documents what a studio could do.
Where to go after it
Never, Neverland, which is the better made album and possibly the better record. Then the 2010 self titled album, which is the strongest of the later catalogue and has Waters singing as well as playing everything.
After that, sample rather than work through. The discography contains genuinely excellent records and genuinely poor ones in no discernible order, and the only reliable constant is the guitar.
Sources and notes
Years and labels refer to original pressings. Performance credits follow the album sleeves and Waters' published statements.
