• O C T. XXII. • Annihilator — “Alison Hell”

From the 1989 album Alice in Hell.

Annihilator's line-up changed more times than I can count without a graphing calculator, the only constant being the guitarist and backing vocalist Jeff Waters. I'm pretty sure this group of Canadians would have made it a bit bigger if they were just a little more stable and didn't take so damn long to release a proper album. Despite being active and releasing a demo as early as '85, it took until '89 for them to come out with their first album, and by that time, thrash was sadly already starting to wane a bit. As it was, they were cursed to release most of their albums in the mid '90s, when practically nobody in North America cared about the genre anymore.

Of all the varied albums (with equally varied line-ups), their first one, Alice in Hell is my favorite, and this song is the best one on it. This official video surprised me when I first saw it on youtube, as for some reason, despite remembering the album quite well, I have zero memory of ever seeing the video on TV back when I used to sit on the floor and watch Headbanger's Ball with my older sister when I was a kid. It's quite possible that I was just subconsciously trying to block out the memories of Randy Rampage's radioactively-blond hair.