Slayer

September 1985: Slayer are in New York performing as part of a showcase at the CMJ New Music Seminar. “Hell Awaits”, their most recent album, had come out in March of that same year, revealing a lineup far more cohesive and creative than the one that, two years earlier, had debuted with “Show No Mercy”, a still-raw record influenced by the “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal” (NWOBHM). That night, in the crowd, is producer Rick Rubin, who at the time had just finished work on LL Cool J's “Radio” and was about to complete another cornerstone of the era's hip-hop, the Beastie Boys' “Licensed To Ill”. An eccentric character, Rubin had founded Def Jam back when he was still in college, and also nursed an unhealthy passion for the most extreme sounds in music, from punk to metal.

His friend Peter Daugherty, who worked for MTV, had recently played him the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but Rubin had shrugged it off, since what he really wanted was something much heavier. That wish came true right at the CMJ New Music Seminar, precisely when Slayer took the stage. Their performance blew away those of Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax and everyone else who tried to make their mark on thrash that late-summer night.

A few weeks later, Rubin bought a copy of “Hell Awaits” at a New York record store. As it happened, while chatting about the band with the clerk, Scott Koenig, Rubin discovered the two were friends. Without missing a beat, he asked Koenig to set up a meeting with the band, offering a rather convincing reason: he already had a record deal ready for them. The meeting took place after a Slayer show at L'Amour in Brooklyn. Having ditched their old label, Metal Blade, Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo embarked on the musical adventure that would lead them to their absolute masterpiece, “Reign In Blood”, universally recognized as one of the most important and influential metal albums of all time.

But let's take things in order.

Born in 1961 in Viña del Mar, Chile, Tomás Enrique Araya Diaz had moved to the United States — Los Angeles, to be exact — at just five years old. Egged on by his brother Cisco, who dabbled on guitar, he picked up the bass at eight and started grinding away at scales, before moving on to playing a few songs by the usual Beatles and Rolling Stones. At around twenty years old, Araya (at the time playing rock with a band called Tradewinds, and then Quits) met guitarist Kerry King (b. 1964), who invited him to join his band. King, who had spent the previous years drifting through odd jobs while obsessively chasing his dream of playing in a band, had built a reputation as a talented guitarist, and back then used to jam with another guitarist, Jeff Hanneman (b. 1964), and drummer Dave Lombardo (b. 1965).

The former, like King, came from the suburbs of Los Angeles, while the latter was born in Havana and had left Cuba at just two years old to move to California, where he attended a private Catholic school, whose tedious lessons he tried to forget by playing the bongos. From the very start, Slayer did everything they could to get noticed. It was mainly around the local schools that the band handed out flyers and made noise with makeshift shows thrown together however they could. They were violent and precise, and the metalheads who came to see them noticed it right away.

At the time, in fact, many bands either had a raw, violent sound or were technically skilled but incapable of really landing a sonic gut-punch. By combining both qualities, Slayer — whose greatest weapons were Lombardo's explosive drumming and King's razor-sharp picking — instantly became a draw for anyone who had made metal their reason for living.

They also began writing a few original songs, though without much conviction. There was, in fact, still some confusion about which direction to take. All four had grown up listening to the hard rock that had won over a large young audience throughout the Seventies, but by the end of that decade, with the arrival of the NWOBHM, their ears had been captivated by the sounds of Judas Priest and company. It was Venom, though, with their unholy fusion of Motörhead and Black Sabbath, who left the deepest mark on the four of them.

Starting in 1982, the year the seminal "Black Metal" came out, the English band became a genuine beacon for Slayer, deeply shaping their aesthetic, which from that point on began treading the paths of satanism. Hardcore punk, however, also played its part. It so happened that, one day, Jeff Hanneman turned up to rehearsal with his head shaved and a few cassettes packed with sonic torpedoes. The others liked that music too, and as they wrote new material they realized that, alongside violence and precision, a hefty dose of speed was exactly what they needed. During a show at the Woodstock Theater in Anaheim, Slayer caught the attention of Brian Slagel, a huge fan of British heavy metal and of Venom, who had for some time been pouring his obsession with that music into his own fanzine, "The New Heavy Metal Revue," and through Metal Blade, a record label giving space to a handful of metal and rock acts from the Los Angeles area via "Metal Massacre," a compilation series whose very first volume also featured "Hit The Lights" by the then-fledgling Metallica.

Once they'd signed with Metal Blade, Slayer made their debut in 1983 with "Show No Mercy," a first record that announced to the world their full-blown passion for that fusion of hardcore and satanic metal already mentioned. The NWOBHM legacy still weighed heavily (especially in King and Hanneman's guitar work), but the band tore through it at breakneck speed, hinting at a personality on the verge of exploding. Critical reactions were mixed, but the album was a solid success for Metal Blade (15,000 copies sold), which spurred Slayer to keep pushing. The following year's EP "Haunting The Chapel" showed enviable growth in both songwriting and execution, turning the band into a formidable engine of brutality and speed, a point soon confirmed by the release of "Live Undead."

Curiously, in 1984 King also briefly joined Dave Mustaine's Megadeth, a move that had Hanneman fearing he'd need to find a new guitarist for the band. The episode, and how it played out — leading to friction between the two bands that would struggle to fully subside even thirty-odd years later — tells us something about the role Slayer chose to play within thrash metal. Slayer surely knew the classics that inspired thrash metal's earliest stirrings, from Black Sabbath's iconic "Symptom Of The Universe" to Diamond Head's paradigmatic "Am I Evil?," but all their focus would zero in on the most violent side of early thrash metal, quickly shedding the seventies-rooted elements that still lingered in the early work of the aforementioned Megadeth, Metallica and Anthrax.

The extremism that captivates Slayer after their first two albums is the same force driving other key names in extreme metal such as Bathory or Mayhem, with whom the Los Angeles band shares common ground not so much in musical style as in a shared Mephistophelian, sulfurous imagery. If we wanted a chemical analogy to picture the state of metal extremism around 1984-85, we could call it the genre's "triple point": the moment when, in unstable equilibrium, you find throwback hard'n'heavy tendencies (leading back to glam-metal), the offshoots of thrash-metal soon to become mainstream, and a third, esoteric path toward a more radical, uncompromising extremism. Slayer would follow precisely that third path, though without ever fully stepping outside the thrash-metal fold — if anything, exploring its outer limits and pointing the way for others.

That direction is very different from the one taken by their fellow American thrash-metal acts, with whom they're always lumped together under the "Big Four" topos. If Metallica were initially driven by a strong pull toward the extremism of a gut-level rage — see the essential debut "Kill 'Em All" (1983) — it's also true that within just two more albums, by the time of the masterpiece "Master Of Puppets" (1986), they had already channeled that adolescent, distinctly hardcore-punk violence into a far more intricate, grandiose and progressive form. On their third album, Dave Mustaine's Megadeth prove that what still sounded rough-edged in their early days was mostly down to production and inexperience on the instruments, since "So Far, So Good... So What!," their third record, is a concentrate of speed and guitar virtuosity with little to nothing left of that early urgency. A similar case can be made for Anthrax, initially the most old-school of the bunch, who within three albums arrived at a thrilling, and even tongue-in-cheek, comic-book take on thrash metal all their own.

None of the other "big" bands, in short, take the path leading from the violence, urgency and visceral energy typical of a debut toward a thrilling sublimation of that first outburst, a definitive fulfillment of that initial wave of raw, skin-deep aggression. Once they had the technical and financial means, the other famous American thrash-metal bands chose to use them to polish their sound, add detail to their compositions, or broaden their stylistic range.

It's no coincidence that, to find bands with similar trajectories, you have little luck staying within the American continent, even widening the net to other well-known acts such as Testament, who purged themselves of every last trace of malevolence between "The Legacy" (1987) and "The New Order" (1988), or Exodus, who do register some dip in extremism between their 1986 debut "Bonded By Blood" and a cover of Eric Burdon's War in 1989.

In many other cases, circumstances have left us only able to imagine what the real long-term evolution of some of the more extreme thrash-metal bands might have looked like — acts like Possessed, who wouldn't release their third album until 2019, or Dark Angel, responsible for the savage "Darkness Descends" (1986) but essentially spent not long after, partly due to a mainstream breakthrough that never came.

In Europe, rather than in the United States, the reading of thrash metal as a gateway to uncompromising extremism was in fact far more widespread, thanks to unyielding bands such as the German triad of Sodom, Kreator and Destruction, or the Swiss outfit Hellhammer (who would later evolve into the experimental Celtic Frost). In these cases we're not just talking about acts with far less influence on metal's overall trajectory — partly due to national markets much smaller than the American one — but ones that would find in Slayer's example a clear source of inspiration. To put it simply, European thrash-metal extremism can be traced right back to the Slayer blueprint, if not in ultimate results then certainly in inspiration.

Crucial, too, is not just the question of what was being played, but of when: whatever can be likened to Slayer almost always came after Araya and co. had already delivered their own shining example to history. It is, in other words, proof of their impact on the metal scene — the ability of their most celebrated albums to spawn a large following of admirers who shamelessly draw on the chosen blueprint. The "when," as mentioned, matters a great deal, and in this case the year to circle in red is 1986. Slayer agree with producer and manager Brian Slagel that the follow-up to "Hell Awaits" could be their breakthrough record, especially since the market is ripe and demand for thrash-metal bands has never been higher. Great care is taken to leave nothing to chance, right down to a professional photo-shoot and the crafting of the right cover art, credited to Larry Carroll, which over the decades has become one of the most beloved and iconic images in all of metal. The band links up with Rick Rubin and engineer Andy Wallace at Hit City West in Los Angeles and begins exploring the third path mentioned above: rather than retreating from their extreme tendencies, they harness a professional production to push speed to the absolute max without losing an ounce of violence.

The pursuit of intensity is what drives the band through the studio sessions in June and July of 1986, with the songs played at maximum speed, hovering around a dizzying average of 220 beats per minute, and stripped of any superfluous repetition. By the time they wrap up mixing, the clock stops at just 28 minutes and 55 seconds, prompting the band to meet with Rubin to consider adding another track or two to bring it in line with other bands' standards. Luckily, nothing ended up diluting the density of the material, and so on October 7, 1986 — after some delays caused by Columbia's refusal to distribute the album over certain references to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele — Slayer's third album, "Reign In Blood," hit stores via Geffen.

What many bands of the era were still chasing — condensing speed of execution, recognizable structures and technique into a genuinely inspired run of songs — Slayer pulled off in spectacular fashion. Around 1986, shortly before the release of Napalm Death's era-defining "Scum" (the founding document of grindcore, in other words), a number of metal and hardcore bands (in Europe too) had already made speed their banner. But the results had been anything but memorable. Even the name sometimes given to that supersonic-speed music ("chaoscore": Brazil's Brigada Do Odio and the Dutch band Lärm are the first names that come to mind) suggests musicians grappling with something that, ultimately, was beyond their reach.

But the Slayer who walked into Hit City West to record their third album had by then become a perfect machine. Brutal, blazingly fast, precise. They exploded in the ears of metal fans like a smart bomb.

The recording of "Reign In Blood" took a couple of months, between June and July of what is still remembered today as thrash metal's golden year. The Hit City West studio was located in a residential area west of Hollywood, and every day the first to arrive was always Lombardo (at the time, the only member of the band to have started a family), usually followed by Rubin.

Known in music circles as “the ghost producer,” since he'd usually wander off while bands were busy laying their ideas down to tape, this time Rubin decided to make an exception, proving that his bet on Slayer hadn't been made purely by chance. Sitting on a couch, hands clasped and eyes closed, Rubin followed every phase of the recording sessions closely, now and then offering advice to musicians who by this point were anything but unseasoned.

Behind the scenes, sound engineer Andy Wallace simply did what Rubin told him to do, which could be summed up roughly like this: a dry sound, without reverb (“reverb withers the sound” was one of Rubin's favorite maxims), and above all, as aggressive as a punch in the face. In fact, the listener was meant to feel like they were right in the middle of a boxing match, except that they (the listener, that is) were the sparring partner…

Guitars and bass were almost always recorded live in the studio, which was possible because the band had by then reached an enviable level of cohesion, the product of countless shows racked up on the road.

Rubin wanted more solos, but the two guitarists wouldn't give him his way. Hanneman would later recall, with a grin on his face, that if it had been up to the bearded producer, “Reign In Blood” wouldn't have had a single trace of rhythm guitar, just solo after solo. Luckily, things turned out differently, as you can hear for yourself once the needle is dropped into the record's concentric grooves.

The opening salvo, “Angel Of Death”, alternates thrash grooves with dizzying accelerations, while all around it the outline of the Angel of Death takes shape. A year before the album saw the light of day, after long nights spent partying with Araya, Hanneman used to spend his time in his room reading books about Josef Rudolf Mengele, the criminal Nazi doctor who committed horrific crimes conducting medical and eugenics experiments on human guinea pigs (including children) at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The cold, detached way Hanneman describes those experiments in the lyrics left even many of the band's aficionados stunned. But Hanneman wasn't really interested in passing judgment (in his view, condemning those atrocities went without saying); he wanted instead to show the horror, unfiltered. So when Araya, after the initial high-pitched scream (a last-minute addition: something was missing from the take the band had chosen, so Hanneman asked Araya to scream, as loud as he possibly could), utters the album's opening words (“Auschwitz, the meaning of pain/ The way that I want you to die”), we plunge headlong into the thrash slaughter that Slayer had so meticulously prepared. And the sense that we're in the presence of a masterpiece is already crystal clear.

There's no escaping the nightmare with “Piece By Piece”, a track that barely clears two minutes, where the previous one pushed close to the five-minute mark. “Piece By Piece” materializes with grim, cutting cadences before plunging into a whirling gallery of decapitations, dismembered bodies, decomposed limbs, and so on. “Modulistic terror/ A vast, sadistic feast/ The only way to exit/ Is going piece by piece”, the opening lines of what is, in every sense, a concentrated shot of lightning-fast thrash metal, powered by the extraordinary guitar interplay of the Hanneman/King duo and a rhythm section that weaves its metronomic web without missing a beat, indeed beautifully underpinning, around the eighty-second mark, a groove-laden break that's pure euphoria before the final straightaway.

After a track credited solely to Hanneman (“Angel Of Death”) and one crafted by King alone (“Piece By Piece”), “Necrophobic” seals the collaboration between the two, on which all of “Reign In Blood”'s songwriting rests. Of the opening trio, “Necrophobic” is the fastest track and also the shortest (1:40), as if to symbolize the will to compress power and execution speed into the shortest possible time. The result is devastating: the guitars are whirlwinds of crazed electricity (with a peak represented by one of the album's most thrilling solos), the drums a geometric tornado (some consider this Lombardo's single most effective performance), and Araya's words those of a malevolent entity listing off various types of torture and ways to die, further underscoring the strong “gore” streak that runs through the record from start to finish.

With “Altar Of Sacrifice”, the pace slows, but the combination of thrash pummeling, hallucinatory solos and the geometry of Evil is still devastatingly effective. It's the album's most overtly satanic track. Decelerating, “Altar Of Sacrifice” then gives way to “Jesus Saves” (a fierce condemnation of religion as organized power), whose first part unfolds as a sweeping digression tinged with sludge, before breaking off into fresh, blazing instrumental trajectories, this time with an approach closer to a hardcore band caught up in a demonic slam-dance, where Araya's words stop being mere vehicles of meaning and turn into bullets. For the record, the track recycles a few riffs that had already appeared in “Ice Titan”, recorded by the band back in 1982.

If you've got the vinyl, this is where you flip the side and drop the needle on “Criminally Insane”, which opens with a lone drum marching at martial pace and proceeds with the cadence of a tank rolling through enemy territory, between rock-solid riffs played in unison by the two guitars and the tale of a maniac's prison escape plans, one who makes sure to let us know he still has murderous plans in mind (“For my victims, no tomorrow”).

A female perspective (specifically, that of a witch condemned to the stake who hurls threats at her executioners) is the one taken on by “Reborn”, in which the band's more punk-hardcore spirit resurfaces. Despite being one of the least performed songs live, “Reborn” is charged with an almost unbearable ferocity at times. Araya literally spits the words from his throat (“Convicted witch, my life will end at midnight on the stake/ My dedicated life was spent to insubordinate”); Lombardo is a drum machine made of flesh and bone; King and Hanneman are two terrorists on loan to the six-string, whose respective sonic paths here, as throughout much of the album, rely less on unorthodox solutions (though the use of “out of scale” chords on more than one occasion might suggest a jazz-informed approach) than on a constant tension between raw energy and versatility.

A spectacular drum roll from Lombardo sounds the charge for “Epidemic”, a midtempo track that shows, if further proof were needed, just how crucial the introverted drummer was to the making of “Reign In Blood”. As the title suggests, the lyrics deal with an epidemic. But it's an epidemic that symbolizes a “permanent disease,” a “death machine” that infests even corpses. And Slayer themselves are just such a permanent machine, capable, by the eighth track, of still holding steady, showing no signs of flagging, grinding out thrash metal with the same brazen intensity with which, just minutes earlier, they had announced to the world that the horror of Auschwitz is still here among us. But we haven't reached the destination yet. There remains the closing diptych: “Postmortem”/“Raining Blood”.

The first recalls somewhat the two-part structure of “Jesus Saves”, moving from a granite-hard groove (with a riff whose creeping menace is matched only by the icy sequence of images in a lyric centered on the unknown lurking behind the word “death”) toward yet another headlong acceleration (pay attention to the blind ferocity of Araya's vocal tone…), set up by an instrumental digression that conjures the ghost of progressive rock.

Non-rising body from the grave

showing new reality

What I am, what I want,

I'm only after death

The second track, introduced by a thunderclap and the sound of driving rain covering the last chord of "Postmortem" like a shroud, is born in a sinister, Sabbath-like setting (Hanneman reportedly had in mind an urban scenario laden with dark omens), before one of the wildest riffs in the entire history of metal turns the gaze toward the figure of Satan, seated on his infernal throne, surrounded by impaled bodies and besieged by a rain of blood. The same blood that will remain alone to fill the album's final grooves, but not before hearing Slayer smash through the bpm barrier, like a battalion of death with nothing left to do but surrender itself to legend.

Raining blood

From a lacerated sky

Bleeding its horror

Creating my structure

Now I shall reign in blood

Ride the wave of great music

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16/05/2021