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

by Ferris, D. X.

  “Piece by Piece” is a prime example of how close the band’s demo tapes were to the finished product. Early versions of the song start with four drumstick clicks, then six seconds of a rhythmic bass riff before the rest of the band joins in the barbed skank.

  “That’s one that actually changed,” says King, making a big note on the small alteration. “It originally had a bass intro. Either [we didn’t like] Tom’s bass sound … or I wasn’t vibing on it. Yanked it.”

  The song is all rhythm. Instead of a wild guitar lick, the solo is simply an isolated riff break, as in the oft-excerpted “Angel of Death.”

  “The tremolo picking and the riffing is just amazing,” says Jim Root, explaining the song’s whiplash groove. “It’s great. It’s amazing. I’m a big fan of certain pop music, too. Certain Who songs are two and a half minutes long, but they manage to put everything they need to say in that amount of time.”

  At that point in their careers, King and Hanneman had little knowledge of musical theory; some of Slayer’s unintentional sophistication isn’t so much innovative as elemental. Like hardcore, their off-kilter rhythms veered in and out of waltz times, sometimes powered by a mutated polka beat.

  “The actual musical elements are very close to some Romanian music and some flamenco,” says Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hütz. “The twirling of the notes, the tremolos, the same speed of it. As a DJ, I explore that direction to the maximum. Once I’d discovered that, I’d put Slayer in the same set, and do some cross-mixing. If you take a Romanian band called Taraf de Haidouks back to back with any cut from Reign in Blood, it would fall in the same emotional category.”

  The song ends suddenly, like it’s been dealt a fatal wound. With a cymbal crash still fading, Araya barks the title a final time. Right when years of metal have taught you to expect a solo, the two-minute massacre is over.

  “The way the song ‘Piece by Piece’ ends is sick,” says Obituary guitarist Trevor Perez. “‘PIECE BY PIECE!’ You’re like, ‘Holy shit! Rewind that again!’”

  “Necrophobic”

  Slayer’s twin shredders split music, solos, and lyrics in “Necrophobic,” the album’s first Hanneman-King collaboration. The song continues the disc’s themes: death (necro-) and fear (-phobic).

  The Mengele-like narrator of “Necrophobic” tortures victims and logs the results, hoping to ward off death by inflicting it. Violent music matches the lyrics, which Araya spits out with an urgency to match the music. The title track to Hell Awaits may have been some of the fastest vocals of the time, but his diction was off. Without the lyric sheet, everything but “Hell awaits” was a blur. On Reign in Blood, Araya kept up the pace, but he’d learned to articulate.

  “His voice has a real urgent, drill-sergeant kind of vibe to it,” says Devin Townsend. “If something did turn my head about Slayer, it was Tom Araya’s voice, because it had a real intelligible quality to it that was not a death metal grunt. I could pick out the words that he was saying.”

  The song is the first half of a full-speed double-shot. “Necrophobic” and “Altar of Sacrifice” feature some of the disc’s most direct—not to be confused with simple—playing by both the guitarists and Lombardo. Before a chaotic solo, the band catch their breath in a long breakdown. They’ll need it. Hanneman makes his guitar bleat like a sacrificial goat.

  Countless musicians have praised Reign in Blood’s “sick guitar tones.” Converge’s Kurt Ballou, also a producer, says the Slayer sound is a legacy of consistency.

  “They play vintage Marshall amps without the typical overly distorted, compressed, scooped midrange of their contemporaries,” says Ballou. “I love the fact that the Slayer guitar rigs have changed very little over the years.”

  Reign in Blood’s continuing relevance is also impressive in light of the post-millennial hard-rock arms race: Instrumental parlor tricks allow novices to fake maneuvers that once took years of practice. Drummers routinely use triggers to simulate Lombardo-style double-bass kicks. And since the late-90s nü metal revolution, bands have learned to sound heavy without actually being heavy. Unlike the downtuned masses, Slayer’s barebones sound commands respect across the board.

  “Reign in Blood is an amazing record,” says Agnostic Front’s Roger Miret. “It’s insane. Like Metallica’s Kill ’Em All, it’s in the key of E. Today, bands are tuned down to C. That sound is monstorious, just the tuning. What they did in just a regular E tuning is unheard of—you can’t get that, you know? They’re an amazing band.”

  The “Necrophobic” solo is also a prime example of the two guitarists executing metal technique while using punk’s minimalist approach. Metal fans expected ripping solos; what King and Hanneman give them is a quick slash.

  “I remember being a young guitarist, and always trying to figure out my favorite solos,” says Chimaira’s Rob Arnold. “But I clearly remember trying to avoid learning Slayer solos because they sounded just too crazy and impossible. I would think to myself: How in the world do these guys remember these insane combinations of notes? You had to be more than human to play that stuff.”

  “Altar of Sacrifice”

  “‘Altar of Sacrifice’ is my favorite song on that album,” says High on Fire frontman Matt Pike. “I think the devil gave them that song, and that they performed it perfectly.”

  The song is Reign’s most openly Satanic track. The music is Hanneman’s, but King wrote the words. The evil yarn is King at his best, building Araya’s rhythmic delivery into the lyrics. Reading them aloud, it’s hard to get too far from the beat.

  “Awaiting the hour / Destined to die / Here on this tale of Hell,” recites Hirax frontman Katon W. De Pena, recalling the opening line. “The delivery on that stuff is unreal. That’s beautiful. The way the lyrics are written, and his singing, and his phrasing—the phrasing with the lyrics is what makes it work. That’s poetry.”

  The song’s third verse is practically a double-time rap, capped with King’s “Praise hail Satan!” Delivered from Araya’s gut, the campy lyric sounds genuinely demonic.

  “My favorite song is ‘Altar of Sacrifice,’” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor. “‘Altar of Sacrifice’ had that ‘praise hail Satan’ part. When you’re thirteen or fourteen years old, it made you feel super-evil to sing along to that. It was a pretty awesome vehicle for teenage rebellion—which every generation needs.”

  At the song’s genesis, the guitarists recycled scraps of “Ice Titan,” one of the band’s earliest efforts. Even though “Altar” pushes the three-minute mark, it might be the album’s most hardcore moment. Its insistent, repetitious guitar line is one long strafing run. But taken as a punk composition, it’s epic. Where a hardcore band might have thought up the whomping riff and played the bejeezus out of it for ninety seconds, Slayer build onto it, starting with a staccato intro like Metallica’s “Whiplash.” In three screaming leads, Hanneman shows that King isn’t the only guy in the group who can rough up a tremolo arm.

  “I always used to think the whammy bar was cheesy,” says Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher. “Like, you’d see [classically influenced shred hero] Yngwie Malmsteen play, like, ‘Man, look at that pussy shit.’ But Hanneman plays like he’s choking the life out of his guitar. He looks like his hands are just moving up and down the neck, and he holds his pick in his fist, but you can hear every single note he’s playing crystal clear.”

  In the U.S., Def Jam would release “Postmortem” and the “Criminally Insane” remix as twelve-inch singles (a “Raining Blood” single would surface with new tracks from 1988’s South of Heaven EP). But “Altar” would make it onto the air-waves all the way in Sweden, where it would send metal in a new direction.

  “I heard ‘Altar of Sacrifice’ on national radio,” recalls Anders Björler, guitarist of At the Gates, pioneers of Swedish melodic death metal. “That made me buy the album. I thought the riffing style was something new entirely. It’s their choice of tonation that’s interesting, but also their rhythmical sense. It’s a combinat
ion of those that makes their sound. Of course, I was familiar already with the open-E-string-palm-mute kind of riffs from Metallica, but Slayer took it a bit further. They introduced the faster stuff—triplets and grinding 16s and 32s notes.”

  Which isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Thrash guitarists do, in fact, play like they’re smothering the guitar. In palm-muting, a guitarist plays with his pick hand pressing down on strings, and the extra force makes a heavier sound. Slayer’s technique is sort of technical, sort of not.

  “They invented a new way of playing,” says Pike. “It’s the perfect balance between completely extreme and still good. It’s raw aggression with intelligence. It’s pure genius. They just have this unique style that you can’t explain. It doesn’t make any sense, technically. It’s bad, but it’s good. It’s the perfect mixture of punk rock and metal. It’s as blatantly sloppy and crazy as you can get, but they do it the same every single time.”

  “Jesus Saves”

  Seamlessly, “Altar” slows down into the silty “Jesus Saves” guitar intro. Even if you know the album, it’s easy to not notice you’re now in a new song.

  “My favorite part is the ‘Altar of Sacrifice’ transition into ‘Jesus Saves,’” says Chimaira guitarist Rob Arnold. “From where Tom yells ‘Salvation,’ and then into the solo. The solo paints a mental picture of what it might actually feel like to be falling from nowhere and twisting through the landscapes of Hell. And then it slows down and leaves you hanging for just the right amount of time before one of the sickest riffs of all time chugs in. As ‘Jesus Saves’ begins to unfold, I picture troops marching towards the front line. And then BOOM, an explosion as they pick up the pace, and the battle continues.”

  In time, the Slayer song with the least likely title has become a musical touchstone.

  “There’s a ton of those groove riffs that a modern-day hardcore kid would call a breakdown [like] the beginning riff of ‘Jesus Saves,’” says Throwdown frontman Dave Peters. “Every band in hardcore that’s trying to write a song that starts with a guitar lead that comes into a heavy breakdown, whether they know it or not, they’re ripping off that song.”

  If Metallica had written “Altar” and “Jesus Saves,” the two three-minute rippers might have been a single six-minute tour de force. In fact, as one of 1986’s metal masterpieces, Reign in Blood stands as a counterpoint to Metallica’s Master of Puppets: Master has two fewer songs, and is nearly twice as long. The albums are structurally and technically comparable. But where Metallica stacked riff atop riff and played them for eight minutes at a clip, Slayer compositions sounded like hardcore at an ambitious pinnacle.

  “Jesus Saves” is the one song on Reign that’s not about death, dying, and killing. With music and lyrics by King, the anti-religious imagery moves beyond the easy blasphemy of Hell Awaits. With “Jesus Saves,” the band tapped into anti-Christian zeitgeist. After hearing their music condemned from the pulpit in recent years, metal fans had a lot to laugh about in 1986. That year, scandals broke involving televange-lists Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Oral Roberts. All that holier-than-thou talk, it seemed, was just so much talk.

  “One of the things that really stands out for me is the song ‘Jesus Saves,’” says Dave Ellefson, Megadeth’s bassist in 1986. “Slayer just blatantly stepped out and made a statement that was so bold about religion. That really planted the flagpole on their mountain, like, ‘They’re not really gonna do that, are they? They’re doing that. Oh my God.’ I think that really defined Slayer’s lyrics, and gave them their true identity.”

  Early in the tour, before the entire audience had the album, Lombardo shocked audiences by telling them he wanted to hear them shout, “Jesus Saves.” Fans without a lyric sheet booed or kept quiet. Once they had the words to clear up their confusion, crowds would warm to the song, eagerly shouting the “Jesus saves” chorus—two of the song’s few easily decipherable lyrics.

  “It’s just intense,” says Entombed frontman Lars Göran Petrov. “Those vocals, they’re not growly. Tom Araya can get that feeling out with high-pitched vocals, total aggression. I get happy listening to it.”

  The song didn’t just establish what Slayer stood for; it represented thrash in general.

  “‘Jesus Saves’ has a lot of breaks, a lot of classic thrash metal drumming in it,” observes Ellefson. “But it’s got the speed breaks, and the slower breaks. And that was kind of a defining sound about how we played thrash metal: You didn’t just stay the course and play one big monster groove.”

  The two guitarists trade solos, each sharper than the last. Unlike the guitar duos that preceded them, King and Hanneman aren’t so much a team as a unit.

  “The best part about them is there’s no lead guitar,” says Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams. “They can both do the same thing.”

  On either side of a Hanneman workout, King solos with a brute urgency.

  “The solos broke new ground,” says rapper-producer Ill Bill. “They were bugged-out sounding. They weren’t super-melodic double-guitar attacks like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden solos. They were fucked-up serial-killer scribble-on-a-wall solos. There’s a perfect imperfection to their solos.”

  Now, with the religious right firmly entrenched across the country and playing a major role in America’s cultural wars, the song still speaks to disenfranchised metal fans.

  “When I see the world through Slayer’s eyes, I see the same thing they do,” says Fistula’s Corey Bing, who hails from the hotly contested red state Ohio. “I see the state of the world and the horror that we live in every day. I see that most people don’t give a fuck about anything other than themselves and pushing their stupid religious bullshit on everyone they can. Those are the ones Slayer warned us about.”

  “Criminally Insane”

  Reign in Blood side two opens with the musical opposite of side one’s blast-off. Reign averages over two hundred beats per minute, but “Criminally Insane” drops the tempo nearly in half—to get started. At the time, Lombardo’s near-funky lead percussion was a unique moment in thrash. The song is a drummers’ favorite, and it opens with Reign’s second-most famous hitting-the-kit moment: As the song starts, Lombardo plays alone, riding a cymbal like he’s creeping up behind you, a menacing harbinger of bad intent.

  “Everyone mimics that at sound check,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor. “You go see the Foo Fighters play at sound check, the drummer plays ‘Criminally Insane.’ And everybody knows what it is.”

  The head-nodding beat and Araya’s accent-on-the-three delivery don’t exactly sound rap-ish—though they could easily have been adapted for another Run-DMC rock cover. It’s the kind of contribution many assume came from Rubin, but the music is essentially the same on Hanneman’s demos. The drum-machine cymbals aren’t nearly as nuanced; like many of the band’s signature percussion moments, the guitarist sketched it out, and Lombardo gave it depth and definition.

  “I loved ‘Criminally Insane,’ says Charlie Benante, drummer of Anthrax and S.O.D. “I wish they would bring that into the [live] set. I love the intro beat. It just sets the song up so well. And coming from a drummer’s point, it’s such a funky beat, and then the song kicks in, like yeah, that’s it. I think Dave totally fits Slayer. He just plays with a ferociousness. There’s just something to be said about the chemistry between Dave and the rest of those guys. I don’t think any other drummer could have done Reign in Blood.”

  Unlike Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Megadeth’s Peace Sells, and Anthrax’s Among the Living, Reign in Blood doesn’t have a single soft guitar intro. Lombardo’s quiet, chiming change-up might be the Slayer’s best-received deviation from stones-out thrash in their entire catalog.

  “Dave is, for sure, a really super fast drummer, but also knows when to hold back,” says Pelican drummer Larry Herweg. “Some of their best moments are the slower ones, like the intro to ‘Criminally Insane’ and on later records, songs like ‘South of Heaven.’ Lombardo is great at intros. H
is intros are all simple but crushing.”

  Doom arrives in the form of guitars and the brute voice of a nocturnal stalker, with words and music co-conjured by Hanneman and King. We meet another ambitious serial killer, an institutionalized murderer who’s plotting escape.

  The songs’s proto-chug riff is one of the album’s deceptively simple-sounding performances. King and Hanneman play in rhythmic unison, advancing together in a whole new two-man style that’s a world away from the melodic leads Dave Murray and Adrian Smith perfected in Iron Maiden.

  “The rhythms are like a scale, some of the harmonies they do,” explains Obituary guitarist Trevor Perez. “It’s pretty sick. Not many people do that stuff in heavy music: You’re like holding out and picking as fast as you can. People still don’t do a lot of that.”

  The song’s climax is one of the more crystalline passages in a thoroughly evocative lyric sheet: “Branded in pain / Marked criminally insane / Locked away and kept restrained / Disapprobation, but what have I done / I have yet only just begun to take your fuckin’ life.”

  The D-word—“disapprobation,” meaning indignant disapproval—brings up three interesting facets of Slayer lyrics.

  One: Slayer’s guitarists used big words. Hanneman says he and King weren’t above cracking open a thesaurus.

  “Kerry and I—none of us in the band were really stupid people,” says Hanneman. “Back then, me and Kerry would always look for a better word. It was the cool thing to do. We had words banned from our lyrics for a while. I took out fate, like ‘You can never use fate again.’ We thought it was cool.”

  Hanneman and King didn’t see much ambition in the more-gore death metal that followed Reign in Blood. That steady—but often unimaginative—parade of deadly images usually had all the sophistication of a store-bought Halloween diorama.