Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3)

by Ferris, D. X.

  The right music at the right time can change your life. And a conscientiously executed review can help you find it. Out of habit, I dropped three bucks on the August ’85 issue of Creem Close-up: Metal Rock ‘N’ Roll. Every month, a three-man tag team of reviewers—Martin Dio, Jesse Grace, and Hal Jordan—chatted up records in a round-table discussion. That issue, they listened to Impaler’s Rise of the Mutants, Abbattoir’s Vicious Attack, Savatage’s The Dungeons Are Calling, Venom’s Possessed, Exodus’s Bonded by Blood, and Slayer’s Hell Awaits. Slayer was a new name.

  “It sounds like hardcore,” said Grace, ringing a bell the size of the Big Ben in my mind. “And if I was in a dark room late at night reading Stephen King or something scary, and I heard this coming from nowhere it would scare the shit out of me.”2

  Reading Stephen King paperbacks was the one thing that made my days in Catholic school bearable. Slayer was hardcore-influenced thrash that sounded like Stephen King? I was in.

  Hell Awaits was a huge letdown—for about a minute and half. The Creem guys had described it as some kind of full-throttle thrash masterpiece. But the album kicked off with some obligatory backward-masked chanting, followed by what felt like five minutes of slow, building, mathematical groove. “Fuuuck,” I thought, staring at my combo turntable-radio-double-cassette-deck. “Hardcore? Killer thrash? Here I sit, seven bucks poorer, burned by another shitty record review. Who are these pricks that call themselves music critics, and can’t they do a better job—”

  Before I could add the question mark, the song exploded in a supercharged nitrous blast and stayed there. Tom Araya’s speed-slurred vocals kicked in, and my hair blew back, like the guy in that Maxell commercial, sitting in front of a stereo like it’s a wind tunnel. Two minutes after I’d dismissed them, Slayer were now the kings of metal. There was none higher.

  Of course, a flat-out-violent album with a cover featuring a pentagram logo, a decapitated corpse, and a trio of demons eviscerating a damned soul’s entrails would sound great to a disgruntled Catholic-school kid. But it wasn’t just me. Slayer owned.

  About the same time, in New Orleans, a teenager named Philip H. Anselmo—a future metal singer whose résumé now includes Pantera, Down, and Superjoint Ritual—bought the Hell Awaits tape. He had a similar epiphany.

  “I remember that album, the day it came out,” Anselmo told me nearly twenty years later, during an interview for an article about why 80s metal was still relevant. “Me and my friend, we picked it up and popped it in the tape deck in his van. And I had to roll down the windows. I almost started crying, it was so great.

  “Hell Awaits just holds the entire thing,” Anselmo explained. “Every bit of everything to do with heavy music. They are gods, the best metal band from California, for sure.”

  A year later, the metal mags said Slayer had a new album due. The July release date came and went. No Slayer record. There was some kind of controversy about it. It was too something for their new major label. Details were scarce. This was before the Internet, before Blabbermouth. If you wanted metal information, you got it from magazines that had been written a month or two ago. But the pain-in-the-ass news confirmed my teen paranoia: it was us metalheads against the world.

  Reign in Blood snuck up on me a couple months later, on a school bus. Some kid walked down the aisle and handed the bus driver a tape. Then began Reign in Blood.

  A throat-ripping scream cut through the collective din of sixty yapping kids. Heads turned. Conversations stopped. It was like a scene from a fantasy novel, where the sky turns black, lightning splits the heavens open, and a giant glowing hand of doom floats in the darkness, summoning all the faithful, letting them know the dark lord has returned to finish his savage business. Slayer was back. Reign in Blood was here.

  That said, once Reign in Blood was in my hands, it disappointed too. I didn’t like it. It was different. It could have been the best metal album ever—as it turned out, it was. I didn’t care. It wasn’t the same as Hell Awaits. To my teenage mind, different was bad.

  I didn’t know at the time, but Slayer liked D.R.I. too. After growing up listening to Deep Purple and Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin, Slayer had embraced hardcore. On Reign, the seven-minute vampire songs were gone, replaced with three-minute rippers. It took some getting used to. And again, it wasn’t just me. Across the country, even some of Slayer’s friends were disappointed.

  “It’s a pretty severe, stormy record,” says Dark Angel drummer Gene Hoglan, grudgingly acknowledging Reign’s superlative spot in the metal canon. “I thought Hell Awaits was better. I thought [Slayer’s pre-Hell EP] Haunting the Chapel was a real exciting turning point, where they went from an Iron Maiden–type band, a very Metallica-esque band, into something larger. But Reign in Blood was the one album for everybody. Every song was an exciting song, and they definitely captured the essence of everything that thrash was about.”

  Slayer kept me signed up for the metal militia. Still, I straddled hardcore and metal—as it became increasingly fashionable to do so. D.R.I. was the only thing I could find that was more switchblade-fast than Slayer, so they were worth a trip into the city, where their tours would stop at the Electric Banana, Pittsburgh’s dingy punk stronghold. I’d seen them the summer of ’86, on tour for the thirty-three-minute, twenty-five-song Dealing With It. Summer ’87, they came back.

  Things were changing in ’87. A few fellow longhairs in denim had been at the ’86 show. Mostly, though, the crowd were punks in rattier clothes, with shorter hair, wearing bootleg Corrosion of Conformity EYE FOR AN EYE T-shirts. A year later, the turnout was bigger and way more diverse. While my ears and body took a beating in the pit, my bony teenage ass was knocked halfway across the club, sent flying by a kid with a crew cut-devilock combo, who was wearing a Reign in Blood T-shirt, which was sliced open under the sleeves, presumably to show off lats that he’d been sculpting at football practice earlier that afternoon. As I sailed from one side of the pit to the other, a thought occurred to me: a year earlier, you never would have seen that kind of guy at a punk show, in a Slayer shirt.

  Metal and punk, once warring tribes, were now beginning to merge into a single movement. And they’d continue to do so. United and strong, both were slugging their way out of the underground. Thrash was metal that hardcore kids could no longer completely discount. And it was intense enough to make metal kids quit headbanging and start moshing. Today, metal and hardcore are often indistinguishable. Groups themselves can’t tell the difference. After the millennial metalcore (metal + hardcore = “metalcore”) generation, how you label your band says more about your friends than your music.

  Soon after Reign, Slayer’s South of Heaven arrived. By then, I’d come around, and the double gutpunch of “Postmortem” and “Raining Blood” was more stimulating than most of my favorite horror movies. Again, not just me: Slayer was now too big for clubs. This tour, they packed City Limits, a roller rink that hosted big shows like the final Black Flag tour, which pulled the crossover crowd of punks, jocks, metalheads, and college kids.

  Slayer live was pure chaos, a mad crush. A sea of bodies pressed into each other, screaming along to “South of Heaven,” so frantic to push to the front that there wasn’t much of a pit. You could lift your feet off the ground and not fall. Metalheads leapt atop the crowd, surfing waves of arms, adrenaline, and testosterone, kicking careless concertgoers with high-top sneakers. At hardcore shows, the mosh was a form of dancing. At metal shows, kids just went nuts. It was on.

  Over the next few years, my favorite bands dropped like flies. Hardcore acts went metal and slowed down. Metal groups changed lineups, slowed down, and wrote softer songs. Metallica wrote ballads and followed one with a sequel. Disappointed by his heroes, this metal kid moved on. By ’92, almost every band from ’86 was missing some crucial element that once made them great. Except Slayer. (No wonder grunge cleaned house.)

  Slayer held it together. Slayer kept their fans in the game. A Slayer album arrived every few years, no
matter what you were doing in life, no matter what you’d been listening to. And they were all, at least, pretty darned good. 1998’s Diabolus in Musica is criminally underrated. 2001’s God Hates Us All was a very different kind of piece than Reign, but at least Araya wasn’t rapping.

  Fall 2003, metal was making a comeback, and Slayer were still at the head of the pack. That tour made a metal fantasy come true: Slayer played the entire Reign in Blood album. The band had still never scored a big single, and they hadn’t played full-sized arenas for a while. But it was still a monumental show, a musical event on par with Roger Waters playing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, the Who touring Quadrophenia, or Sonic Youth busting out all of Daydream Nation at Lollapalooza. The pit wasn’t quite the pure pandemonium you’d expect—it was a Friday night, and most of us old-school guys had worked all day. Some shirtless young bucks stirred the mosh, shouting “Fuckin’ Slayer!” when the spirit moved them. Old and young metalheads alike felt Reign in Blood was worth getting some bruises.

  When your favorite bands jump the shark, they kill you a little. When you’re sixteen, music might be the most important thing in your life. You love two, maybe five, maybe seven bands. By the time you’re twenty, half have broken up. By the time you’re twenty-two, their new albums are just a formality so they can tour and play their old hits—which aren’t holding up well. The show sucks, and you don’t even bother getting their next record.

  Next thing you know, you graduated college four years ago, and you don’t even really care about music any more. Now you spend your weekends like Old School’s Frank the Tank, double-timing from Home Depot to the Olive Garden. You could care less about which band is coming to town when; you have other things to do. But bands like Slayer keep you coming back to your favorite music. And if you’re a metal fan, you find the culture’s traditional values are much the same. For Slayer fans, Reign in Blood goes on and on.

  “Even now, a Slayer show is a happening,” says Mike Schnapp, who helped assemble the band’s famous Ultimate Revenge video. “It’s a major thing. You see people that you’ve been seeing for twenty years. There’s a social scene there. There’s a common interest. You’re psyched to see each other. You’re psyched to see the band.”

  If one metal album deserves a serious look, it’s Slayer’s Reign in Blood.

  The Argument: Fuckin’ Slayer

  See the band. See Slayer. Backstage in a locker room at Augusta, Maine’s Civic Center, soaked from a rain of blood, slathered in thick, red syrup. Twenty-some years into an unparalleled career, singer-bassist Tom Araya, guitarist Jeff Hanneman, and drummer Dave Lombardo still bang their heads in a fury, lost behind their long hair. Guitarist Kerry King is shaved bald, a demon’s face tattooed into the back of his head. Flecked with gray, they’re in fighting shape, like aging champion gladiators triumphant yet again, playing fast music with the rage of young men.

  Unlike the Grand Guignol tradition of gory theater, some of this evening’s bloodshed is real, though it took place offstage: in a flesh tornado of a mosh pit, fans careened into each other until the restrooms looked like a triage area, scalps split open, foreheads gashed, noses running crimson.

  It’s July 11, 2004: Slayer has just performed their entire 1986 classic, Reign in Blood. The album defined the band—and, as much as any record, the genre of thrash metal. It’s the purest thrash album, recorded by the genre’s greatest, most universally respected group. With an odd mix of label and talent, the disc left deep marks on metal, punk, alternative, and arena rock. It’s the crowning achievement of a transcendent band. Reign survived fire from its own camp and emerged as a classic that’s still relevant to artists inside metal and out, young and not so young, the world over.

  This celebration of Reign ended in a ton of blood—literally: 200 gallons of sticky theater gore, weighing nine pounds a gallon, poured on the band. Slayer’s most enduring nightmare had become a reality. And more red rain would follow. Three years later, backstage in Cleveland, the band reflect on the metal storm.

  “For us, it was for the fans, because the fans have given us so much support, [and said] the album is legendary,” says Hanneman, nursing a Heineken. “So we just wanted to do it for them.”

  With the record, drummer Dave Lombardo set new standards for speed drumming. But the accomplishment wasn’t enough. He would quit the band during their victory-lap tour, only to return three months later. In 1992, he would depart again and remain gone for nearly a decade, the only member of the original quartet to leave the Slayer circle. Filmed for the Still Reigning DVD, the 2004 performance of the thrash titans’ most acclaimed album marked his official, permanent return to the fold—and their ongoing reign as metal’s most uncompromising force.

  “It was fun,” says Lombardo, reflecting on the live Reign in Blood experience. “I think it was an affirmation that we could still do it, that we haven’t slowed down a single bit. I’m forty-two. Tom is forty-six. So we’re still there. We’re still strong. There’s a lot of bands, a lot of musicians out there, they’ve reached their peak a long time ago, and can’t play worth a shit today. And we’re playing music that’s more demanding, physically, than anybody else can even imagine that guys at our age can do. So I think it’s an affirmation of who we are and what we’ve stood for all this time.”

  Lombardo’s playing wasn’t the only storied execution from Reign in Blood. The record opens with one of heavy metal’s great screams. The word “Auschwitz” is next, followed by a series of seminal moments—bludgeoning drum rolls, drill-bit riffs, and morbid subjects in sinister songs. It concludes with a hair-raising tune called “Raining Blood,” ending in the sounds of a dirty downpour that marked heavy metal’s cyclical renewal.

  Slayer isn’t the biggest band to emerge from the mid-80s thrash movement (Metallica is); better, they’re the standard-bearers of metal itself. They’re revered by groups you know, bands you’ve never heard of, and musicians you’d be surprised to hear weigh in on their behalf. Slayer has as many better-than-good albums as any band, but guitarist Kerry King says they wouldn’t play another full record live. They’re all longer, and none has an unbroken string of favorites. Explains the guitarist, “Everybody likes Reign in Blood.”

  The controversial album remains the gold standard for extreme heavy metal. It’s a seamless procession of ten blindingly fast songs in just twenty-nine minutes, delivered in furious bursts of instrumental precision. Its lyrics are so striking that Tori Amos was moved to record a cover. Its hooks are so monstrous that Public Enemy sampled a song. Reign in Blood saw the Los Angeles standouts permanently fuse classic rock’s technical proficiency, hardcore punk’s speed, and metal’s brute power—all captured with crystalline clarity.

  “I think it was one of the first records of its genre that was recorded well, which makes a lot of difference,” says producer Jack Endino, who has worked with Nirvana, Soundgarden, and High on Fire. “And that’s why that record has such impact. It wasn’t just a shitty indie band any more. It’s clear, it’s crisp, it rips your head off. It’s the first one I took seriously, and I was not paying attention to metal or thrash much.”

  Little wonder, considering the record’s pedigree.

  At the time, the team behind Reign in Blood were unusual matches. Years later, the combinations only seem more odd: Reign was produced by Rick Rubin, then just some New York rap dude—albeit a successful one. Then, he was best known for creating hip-hop albums with groups such as Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. Now he’s a Grammy-winning Producer of the Year, renowned for his work with Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, the Dixie Chicks, and Justin Timberlake. When he’s not producing, he’s the co-head of Columbia Records. Reign was engineered by Andy Wallace, now the first name in rock mixing, producer of Jeff Buckley’s ethereal Grace, and engineer of Nirvana’s earth-shaking Nevermind. Not to mention Slayer themselves, a rock combo for the ages, with thrash’s most combustible onstage chemistry.

  Working in a much-maligned genre, guitarists Jeff Hanneman
and Kerry King emerged as the Lennon and McCartney of speed metal, having penned a collection of blood-soaked scenes comparable to haunting novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The record stands as a grim treatise on human nature, a statement of violent naturalism, an unflinching look at the human condition’s darkest corners.

  Reign in Blood opens with a song about the true horrors of Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Three songs about serial killers follow. Two gory tales threaten vengeance from beyond the grave. An explicit indictment mocks religion. A plague obliterates the human race. A Satanic cult slaughters virgins for evil power. A piledriving climax looks at death nine ways from Sunday. It’s wonderfully grisly stuff.

  Issued on America’s premier rap label—Def Jam—at the pinnacle of the thrash movement, Reign in Blood set the bar for an emerging genre called death metal. The record continues to serve as a touchstone for headbanger musicians internationally, from underground to arenas, from Poland to Iowa.

  “Reign in Blood, it’s a dogma,” says Nergal, frontman of Poland’s Behemoth. “Slayer kills. Reign in Blood is really top of the tops, definitely one of the best extreme metal albums ever. Not just thrash metal. They’re more than just a thrash band. They are a rock band. Slayer stands there along with Metallica, Kiss, and the Beatles.”

  If, unlike Endino, you were paying attention to metal, Reign is still relevant, recognized as a high-water mark from a golden age.

  “[Reign in Blood], to me, is the epitome of thrash metal,” says Slipknot guitarist Jim Root. “It’s great. I’d definitely give it five stars. It’s straightforward, no-bullshit. Every song kicks ass. Every riff kicks ass. It’s such a short record—absolutely no way you can get sick of it. I would put that album right up there with [Megadeth’s] Peace Sells and [Metallica’s] Master of Puppets and [Anthrax’s] Among the Living. It changed [metal] for the better.”