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

by Ferris, D. X.

  Hanneman says the big words were “something to make the song better. Like, ‘Spit on your corpse’? Bullshit! You can do better than that!”

  Two: Virtually nobody correctly interprets lyrics, from content to meaning. In the heat of a metal-thrashin’-mad song about a incarcerated homicidal madman, you’re not going to reach for a lyric sheet—assuming that you had the words handy and someone didn’t just tape it for you.

  Misunderstood lyrics certainly aren’t a phenomenon unique to the speedier genres: We all assume we know the lyrics to our favorite songs. But we don’t. How much of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” do you really know beyond the chorus and “Leonard Bernstein”? Your brain settles for a resonable facsimile of the words. And before the Internet, we had to come up with our own incorrect lyrics.

  One of my friends turned “Disapprobation / But what have I done?” into “There is no prison / But what have I done?” From “Angel of Death,” another translated “Monarch to the kingdom of the dead” as “Monitor the kingdom of the dead”—which makes a measure of sense. Instead of the correct “Trapped in Purgatory / a lifeless object, alive,” another metal bud heard the opening lines of “Raining Blood” as “Trapped in Purgatory / Attacking object of life.” And, today, even to this informed ear, “bleed internally” in “Epidemic” still sounds a heckuva lot like “bleed eternally.” In fact, the wrong words have a nice ring to ’em.

  Three: With metal and hardcore, even when the writers weren’t using fifty-cent words, it was still hard to tell what blue hell the singers were going on about. It’s part of the fun. You don’t know what the singer’s saying, but in a reaction that’s like an act of faith, you know you want to hesh the fuck out.

  “Reborn”

  Unique in Slayer’s body of work, “Reborn” is told from a feminine perspective. It’s about a witch who’s about to be burnt.

  “There’s an uncommon-for-Slayer vulnerability in the lyrics, due to the presumably female witch as narrator,” observes composer Killick Erik Hinds. “We’ve come to expect unbridled fury from the male perspective. It’s clear we’re dealing with a firestorm of repressed power. ‘Reborn’ exists musically in a kind of stasis, variously defined by the guitar riffs or the drums. It’s like a tag team trading off a frozen snapshot across time. It’s not going any place because it’s already there. The result is a hall of mirrors.”

  Even with a distinct lyrical scenario, the song illustrates how limited the singer’s role was in the creative process at that point. In three albums and two EPs, Araya had yet to score a songwriting credit. King wrote the lyrics (and confirms the witch is a woman). He and Hanneman split the music. Discussing his contribution to the lyrics with Metal Mania’s Beth Nussbaum, Araya made a big deal out of changing a second repetition of “I’ll see life again” to “I will live again.”61 If the composition required editing, it didn’t need much.

  “I think the best crafted song on the album is probably ‘Reborn,’” says Converge’s Kurt Ballou. “All of the riffs are great. The way it bounces between verse, bridge, and chorus, raising intensity with each passing riff and culminating in a pause at the end of each verse is brilliant. Slayer finds a way to maintain energy levels better than any band I’ve ever seen.”

  “Epidemic”

  King wrote the lyrics and music of “Epidemic.” The guitarist tops the body count from “Angel of Death” by imagining “a permanent disease” that eradicates most of the human race. Fortunately—knock on wood; avian flu and SARS haven’t caught on yet—contemporary history hasn’t seen that kind of sweeping disease. It could happen: For one numerologically convenient example, look at the Great Plague of London. Spread by rats, that outbreak was interrupted by the cleansing Great Fire of London, which gutted the city in 1666.

  Like “Criminally Insane,” drums also launch this song. This time, they’re pulverizing. Lombardo crashes across the kit, moving back and forth in dizzying rolls. As with many of Reign’s inspired moments, Slayer and Rubin came up with it on the spot and quickly finessed it into existence.

  “They asked me to do some kind of drum roll,” recalls Lombardo. “And that’s what I came up with at the time. It’s a repetitive drum roll, repeating over and over. 1-2-3-4, with a little swing thing.”

  The straightforward tale of a great plague strikes some socioeconomic notes, starting with the lines, “Breeding fast in poverty / Infectious, driving, dormant seed.”

  Unanchored in conventional technique, King and Hanneman’s mustang solos drive a certain type of guitarist nuts. Theory-driven shred-snobs hate them. Thrash fans get it.

  “They’re not really soloing out of key,” explains John Comprix, guitarist of Beyond Fear and Ringworm. “They play in a scale, but they play notes out of that scale. Jazz dudes do it a lot. [King and Hanneman] break a lot of the rules—that makes metal what it is.”

  “Postmortmem”

  Reign in Blood closes with a diabolical diptych, a two-part picture of death and rebirth, a protracted expiration and a dark resurrection, the most killer combo in the history of metal, bar none: “Postmortem” and “Raining Blood.”

  The all-Hanneman hesher masterpiece “Postmortem” begins with a single cymbal strike, which announces a riff that moves along with the tense gravitas of a military march to the site of a precision assault.

  “‘Postmortem’ is amazing,” testifies Slipknot’s Jim Root. “That riff is so fucking bad-ass.”

  The song’s jarring progression has amped-up echoes of both math rock and simpler post-hardcore chug riffs, played with the speed and force of a classic-form Tyson combination. Again, King and Hanneman advance in hectic, riffing harmony.

  “Structurally, I love the two-guitar approach, the unapologetic nature of the structures,” says Helmet guitarist-singer Page Hamilton. “Harmonically, there are chord changes, but it’s not based on tension resolution in the classical-music sense. It’s more tension and energy. And they’re coming from this place … you’ve never heard guitar like that.”

  After spending the album in the shadows, Araya’s bass pushes the song along, locked in with Hanneman’s riff and music, nudging the song toward the abyss.

  “Anyone who can play the bass to those songs and hold down lyric duty and do 360s with his head simultaneously is pretty amazing,” says Sean Yseult, bassist of White Zombie. “[Araya and Lombardo] are amazing together. Lombardo was one of the most insane and perfect drummers to watch perform, definitely in the top three for me, along with [Exodus/Zombie’s] John Tempesta and [Pantera’s] Vinnie Paul.”

  In over twenty-five years of Slayer articles, the phrase “rhythm section” doesn’t come up often. Araya and Lombardo don’t work together like most drummers and bassists.

  “It’s a whole different style of music,” explains Lombardo. “It’s not music based on the bass and drums. It’s different. It’s more like a locomotive: There’s a machine going with all these sounds, the guitars going, and then the vocals on top. It’s more based on drive, rather than the rhythm, the so-called rhythm section. Tom, the way he spits out the lyrics, that’s driving. The guitars, the way they play, it’s all pure energy in raw form. And then there’s the drums.”

  Another death-obsessed narrator loses the remnants of his sanity in verse three, which culminates in a frothing-mouth question from Araya: “Do you wanna die?”

  In the song, the question is a brilliant aside. On paper, it looks a little goofy. Even Araya noted as much. In concert, his intro to the song became one of his more enduring stage raps: He’d start by asking the crowd “Do you wanna … die?” To his amusement, they’d often respond by shouting, “Yeaaaah” in the same tone usually reserved for “fuckin’ Slaaayer!”

  “I ask that question during the live shows,” he told Metal Mania’s Fabio Testa. “And the crowd usually says, ‘Yeah!’ and I laugh. Like sure you want to die!”62

  Slayer’s dismembered-tongue-in-cheek sensibility is another element l
acking in much of the extreme metal that followed.

  “I think Slayer are dead serious about the stuff, but you have to be able to do it with a smile,” observes Entombed’s Lars Göran Petrov. “That’s what Slayer is good at: that balance, not getting ridiculously serious about things.”

  Without watering it down, Slayer’s poetic touch made violence and bloodshed palatable in a way that few of their successors would. Little wonder they’d be the most successful purveyors of extreme metal, even without a single moment of popular crossover. To Slayer’s credit, it now seems fans will never find out whether the band had it in them. The group’s songwriters have written virtually nothing except Slayer songs.

  Hanneman penned some punk songs for his short-lived side project Pap Smear in 1985, but that group never recorded. (Slayer revived some of the tunes for their 1996 hardcore tribute, Undisputed Attitude.) King says the only songs he’s finished are the ones you hear on Slayer albums. Araya has a stockpile of lyrics, but says he hasn’t written any non-Slayer tunes. Lombardo is the only member with a discography outside the band.

  While the drummer’s contributions to the group can’t be overstated, he has never received a Slayer songwriting credit. So was Lombardo delusional in his assertion that, with Rubin’s peerless guidance, Slayer could have recorded a commercial song and retained their edge? Hanneman’s question from “Postmortem”—Do you wanna die?—suggests Lombardo may have been right.

  Consider “Possum Kingdom,” the 1995 alt-rock song by the Toadies. The Texas one-hit wonders insist the song is not about vampires—though the lyrics read like a story about hungry bloodsuckers stalking the night. The single cracked the modern-rock top five and became an overexposed radio nugget, in no small part due to a catchy refrain, repeated over and over: “Do you wanna die?”

  “Raining Blood”

  A brief hush transitions from “Postmortem” to “Raining Blood.” Wallace drops in the sounds of rain, and the scene shifts from a grisly death to the underworld. The three floor-tom hits that sounded like a dull rapping on the demo are now mythic booms, warning that Hell is just a doorway away. The album’s third signature drum moment, both simple and brilliant, is often imitated, never duplicated.

  “Anyone who went to hardcore shows in the early 90s will remember how every hardcore band would do a Slayer medley or at least bust out the intro to ‘Raining Blood,’” says Converge’s Kurt Ballou. “The music of Slayer became the musical vernacular a generation of musicians used to communicate.”

  Live, the intro has reared its head over the punk spectrum from Hatebreed to Sum 41. Sum frontman Deryck Whibley—an Island Def Jam artist—is one of the many music fans who doesn’t go for much metal, but tips his hat to Slayer.

  “They wrote some really good songs for their genre,” says Whibley. “They had their own thing, and they’re original.”

  “Raining Blood” lunges to life with its core riff, the ten most recognizable notes in metal, a diminished-scale run down the fretboard that’s the most badass guitar bit since Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” King helped finish the lyrics, but Hanneman wrote the soundtrack to Reign’s inaugural nightmare. (Like the drum intro, the all-time-great riff is nowhere nearly as impressive on the demo.)

  At the core of Slayer’s tradition-flouting technique is the minor scale, intensified by use of diabolus in musica—in Latin, literally, “the devil in music.” Instinctively, Slayer’s guitarists had gravitated toward this dissonant tritone, which had once been banned from use in hymns because of its forboding sound. Legendary Ozzy guitarist Randy Rhoads used the interval often—it’s the sound that gives Diary of a Madman its grit. Conventional major scales can sound happy or triumphant. Diminished—or flattened—notes don’t.

  “Minor notes, they’re why metal sounds so creepy and evil,” explains John Comprix, guitarist of Beyond Fear. “It’s those minor notes that make most people cringe, and make us [metal people] go, ‘YEAH’ and make us rage.”

  On the Reign tour, Slayer opened most sets with the song, and often stormed directly into “Angel of Death”—two tunes they now save as the climax of their concerts. In retrospect, that set list was the equivalent of Springsteen opening a show with “Thunder Road” and following with “Born to Run.”

  “Raining Blood” is King’s favorite Reign song to play live. With diabolus in musica in the air, all hell breaks loose.

  “Wherever ‘Raining Blood’ comes in the set, it just electrifies the crowd,” says King. “People just shit when you hit the first few notes. Like Jesus Christ, it’s just guitar—settle down.”

  The riff repeats four times, and Lombardo lets loose a ballistic double-bass gallop. Like the triple-hit intro, Hanneman had the basic idea, and Lombardo and Rubin fleshed it out. In the mix with the grinding riffs and Araya’s bedrock bass, Lombardo is a doomsday machine.

  “Slayer’s a scary and dangerous band, even without the riffs and vocals,” says Throwdown’s Dave Peters. “I don’t think there’s a riff out there that’s scarier than ‘Raining Blood.’”

  Though the two songs are linked, “Raining Blood” isn’t a direct continuation of the narrative from “Postmortem.” Talking to Metal Mania in 1987, Hanneman pointed to the central figure on Reign’s album cover, and said the album’s final song is about the guy with the goat head (though the song was completed before the cover).63

  “It’s about this guy who’s in Purgatory ’cause he was cast out of Heaven,” said Hanneman. “He’s waiting for revenge and wants to fuck that place up.”

  “The rest of the song explains what happens when he starts fucking people up,” added King. “The lyrics ‘Return to power draws near’ is because he’s waiting to get strong enough again to overthrow Heaven. And then ‘Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears’ is everybody’s blood flowing into him. So basically, ‘Raining Blood’ is all the angels’ blood falling on him.”

  It’s a theologically muddled narrative. Some Christian factions argue that Purgatory is essentially a waiting room between death and Heaven for souls who still need to clean up. St. Augustine said it was a place of hellacious fire. If the Reign cover represents Purgatory, then Hell must be unimaginably terrible; maybe, in fact, more like Auschwitz. But if you can get past the Purgatory issue, then Hanneman and King’s sweeping images like “abolish their rules made of stone” stand as some of metal’s greatest lyrical moments.

  “‘Raining Blood,’ something about that song makes my skin ripple into goosebumps,” says Integrity’s Dwid Hellion. “It has a cinematic quality that takes me to a world similar to a Bosch painting.”

  Araya, Hanneman, King, and Lombardo lock together for moments of mechanized fury, the kind that would later see fruition in Pantera. Just before the song’s climax, a one-two- one-two combination of chords crash like a series of controlled detonations, leading to the return of the song’s Satanic riff.

  Magnificent gutbucket imagery is not unique to heavy metal’s horror aesthetic. We find scenes of spectacular carnage from ancient literature to movies: Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm. Kid Miracleman lays waste to London in Miracleman number fifteen, and dismembered limbs pour from the sky. In Apocalypse Now, Kilgore leads the Valkyrie helicopter raid. Jaguar Paw escapes a field of bodies in Apocalypto. Comanches descend on Captain White’s party in Blood Meridian, leaving a harvest of death. In Macbeth, Banquo’s final words are, “It will rain tonight,” and a trio of murderers advance on him when their leader utters “Let it come down.” Such a moment is the violent apogee of Reign in Blood.

  “As evil and brutal as it was, there’s still hooks in there,” says Mastodon writer/drummer Brann Dailor. “You can’t deny a hook, and ‘Raining Blood’ is a catchy song; that’s all there is to it. There’s melody in those songs, whether people want to admit it. It’s not all just about chugga-chugga. You’ve got to have the beauty and the beast in there; you can’t just have the beast.”

  The song ends in a whammy bar free-for-all. The lyric sheets help identify w
hich guitarist plays which solos in the other songs, but Reign’s final demonic twin assault is simply listed as “noise.” It’s more than random screeching; it’s a mad-dog solo, but moved to the song’s end. Like their other bloody-fingertip fretboard freakouts, elegant it isn’t.

  “There’s dudes that are better—Joe Satriani, Steve Vai,” says Andy Williams, guitarist of Every Time I Die. “But they can’t write a song. Listen to ‘Raining Blood.’ It’s a well written song. Songwriting, riffing, soloing—[Hanneman and King are] not virtuosos; they’re not going to rip a sweeping arpeggio. But their solos are memorable. It’s not just noodling.”

  A beat after the jagged solos reach a climax, the album ends with one last significant sound effect: The rain that began the song culminates in a thunderclap explosion, and Reign fades to black with the sounds of raining blood.

  “At the end of this album, you feel like you’ve been taken on this trip,” says Helmet’s Page Hamilton. “And the rain starts in the background, and you feel it’s time to start over again.”

  From the team that made the record to its fans, most of the people who discussed Reign in Blood have trouble picking a favorite song. Or songs. They typically list “Angel of Death,” “Criminally Insane, “Reigning Blood,” two others, and give up.

  “I could put on Master of Puppets and I’d listen to three songs and switch to something else,” says Ill Bill. “When I’d listen to Reign in Blood, I’d listen to it from beginning to end. It was twenty-nine minutes of crushing perfection.”

  The most common observation about Reign is that it’s a piece, a single-serving record with ten parts, all essential.

  “It’s what a metal record should be, front to back,” says Shadows Fall guitarist Matt Bachand. “It doesn’t drag out. It just gets in, kicks your ass, and it’s gone before you know it. That’s what metal’s supposed to be: It’s supposed to be aggressive, fast-paced, and it leaves you destroyed.”