God, Guns & Guts

Agony Column is a pretty interesting Texas heavy metal band, started out in the late 80's. "God, Guns & Guts" is their first album, and was released in 1989. Their stuff is quite hard to get, but if you manage to get a hold of it it's definitely worth it.
The music is pretty basic and formulaic traditional, but ten times heavier and much more vicious and evil. Imagine a less melodic W.A.S.P. combined with the most straightforward material of Manowar, but much faster and heavier, occasionally equipping some crushing riffs reminiscent of the New York thrash monsters like Anthrax or Overkill.

At times, this album can actually be a little too formulaic, as about eleven out of twelve songs follow the almost exact songwriting patterns with very few deviations. But for the most part this album provides a really good time, and is a very fun listen. The songs are catchy and range from fast paced heavy metal to speed metal, and they are vicious as fuck. "God, Guns & Guts" has some truly evil riffwork and even a thrash break in the middle, and it is my favourite track of the album. But "4X4", "Vicious Pack of Lies", "Fiendish Plots and Diabolical Minds", "Walk The Night", it's all really wicked.
The guys call themselves Hillbilly metal, but on their first album only one song is somewhat oriented to a groovier redneck-style of songwriting.
That song is "Black Jack", a really odd song with groovy country-ish guitarlines and a less evil atmosphere overall than the other stuff found on here.

The production job is also very well done. It's a bit silent, but that's what the volume button is for. Otherwise, the sound is very clear and all instruments, including the bass, are very audible, and the guitars are given a very rough and evil edge.
Also notable is the vocalist, Ritchie Turner. He has a pretty gruff voice that turns into an evil growl at times, but does some really cool higher pitched stuff. He's got a killer voice, and complements the mildly psychotic music very well.

Naming highlights would be quite hard as all of the songs are pretty much in the exact same vein, but some personal favourites are the title track, 4X4, 66 Six Guns For Satan, Walk The Night, Dead By Dawn and the awesomely titled song Cars, Sex & Violence. But really, the great thing about this album is that if you like one song you'll like it all.
So basically, what we have here is a bunch of crazy rednecks playing a brand of metal with the pretty standard arrangements and song constructions of classic heavy metal, but with a bunch of thrash riffs thrown in here and there, along with a murderous attitude. Definitely worth checking out if you happen to come across it.