Even the chill cat who produced Johnny Cash’s My Mother’s Hymn Book and Justin Timberlake’s “Another Song” thinks the record is still pretty hot.
“Slayer is a radical band,” says Rubin. “Reign in Blood sounds as thrilling today as the day we recorded it. I can think of few albums packing the punch of Reign in Blood.”
“Postmortem” and “Raining Blood” might be metal’s most vivid double feature. After taking in Reign in Blood’s album art, it takes some imagination to listen to the last song and think of anything far-removed from artist Larry Carroll’s picture of the underworld.
Tori Amos, however, has some imagination. The singer-pianist recorded “Raining Blood” on her 2001 covers album, Strange Little Girls. In her hands, the five-minute maelstrom stretches out a minute and a half longer. Performed with just her voice and a piano, “Raining Blood” turns into a slow, gothic drone that—make no mistake—is still “a very angry read,” in Amos’s words.
“At that time, it was before 9/11, but the Taliban was in power,” explains Amos. “And what they were doing to the women there was being written about in the New York Times and other major outlets. A musician that I work with was playing me ‘Raining Blood,’ and I just saw the picture of this woman’s beautiful vulva bleeding over, into the mouths of the Taliban. And they needed to drink the blood of the dark goddess, who was so angered by their disrespect…. I think what [Slayer] do is brilliant.”
As Amos prepared her tour for that album, “Raining Blood” took on a life of its own. Author Neil Gaiman—best known for the Sandman graphic novels and the fantasy-novel-turned-movie Stardust—wrote a series of very short stories inspired by each of the record’s songs. Coincidentally, like “Angel of Death,” part of Gaiman’s “Raining Blood” takes place during World War II: Gestapo soldiers shoot a pregnant woman and bury her in an unmarked grave.64
The song has also been adapted and recorded in numerous varying versions. Techno-squad Concord Dawn dropped the tune into drum and bass. Poland’s Vader cut a straightforward modern-metal version; it doesn’t capture the song’s subtleties as well as “Lloviendo Sangre,” a faithful Spanish adaptation by Buenos Aires’s Serpentor. Hinds’ unplugged, instrumental version sounds more like Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss.” Rubin himself looped the chopping chords from the original for rapper Lil Jon’s “Stop Fuckin Wit Me.” Of the “Rain” variations, best of all is Hanneman’s abandoned original vision.
“The song ‘Raining Blood’ was going to be about a killer,” says Hanneman. “He doesn’t start out as a killer. He just gets mad at his girlfriend or some girl he meets. He loses his mind. He kills this woman. And it happened to be raining that night. And the last thing he sees, he leaves the crime scene, he turns around and looks, and he can see her blood going in with the water. And after that, he’s haunted. Every time it rains, he sees blood coming down. And nobody else does, obviously—he’s fuckin’ nuts. So every time it rains, he goes out and kills again.”65
Reign in Blood ends with the sounds of thunder, and of rain smacking into the wet earth. Sixteen years prior, Black Sabbath’s first album—arguably ground zero for heavy metal as a distinct genre—had opened with the sound of a storm. As Slayer’s crowning achievement draws to a close, the first wave of thrash metal reaches its high-water mark. Metal comes full circle, rain to rain, thunder crashing, blood pouring.
Reign in Blood, in Summary
Composer Killick Erik Hinds:
“Metrically, the songs are wild, shattering the conventions of the time and genre, jumping from time signature to time signature—as well as there being sophisticated tempo juxtapositions.
“Harmonically, there’s a real shift for Slayer away from the diatonic preponderance of Show No Mercy—and to a lesser extent Haunting the Chapel and Hell Awaits. Reign in Blood features chromaticism to the furthest degree, and the melodic constructs follow this aesthetic, with a superficially monotonous vocal delivery that, on deeper examination, reveals a subtle and slithering sense of intonation.
“The guitar solos are incredible mini-compositions within the larger framework, and showcase a very fluid notion of melody and harmony against the modal and/or pivot pitch support underneath.
“The rapid starts and stops really tug on the emotions. Rhythmically, it’s relentless. Melodically, it’s a study in severe refinement. I think we can all agree the lyrics are classic meditations on evil.”
High on Fire frontman-guitarist Matt Pike:
“Fucking Slayer rules. They’ll always rule. That’s just the way it is.”
The Legacy
It’s tricky, quantifying whether a band is truly great. Here’s one question to ask when evaluating a group: Have they made three great albums? Slayer has. Reign in Blood was the first installment of an informal trilogy from the Reign team: Slayer’s classic lineup playing, Rubin producing, Wallace mixing (and later coproducing), and Carroll providing covers. After 1988’s South of Heaven and 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss, Slayer were firmly established as metal titans.
After thrash, metal was no longer just for guys with hippie-length hair. Coheadlined by Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer, 1991’s Clash of the Titans tour filled Madison Square Garden. At the same time, Metallica were about to be deified as rock gods. More interesting, however, is thrash’s enduring influence on the smaller crowds.
In 1987, talking to Metal Mania, King summarized his group’s sound—and, inadvertently, demographic: “I think it’s like punk meets Priest: That’s Slayer.”66
That trilogy didn’t single-handedly demolish the walls between hardcore and metal, but Slayer were the MVPs from that shift’s wrecking crew. Metallica and Megadeth liked punk too, but Slayer actually played and hung out with bands like D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies, who had started as hardcore punk rock, then gradually gone metal, playing longer songs with guitar solos. Slayer’s acceptance in the hardcore world said more about the changing face of punk than it did about Slayer’s appeal. After thrash, metal was the new hardcore. Or, hardcore was the new metal, stripped of its modernist get-the-shred-out solos and Led Sabbath dress code.
Once thrash broke, metal fans who had similar musical interests as Slayer (but less talent and practice) comprised the crossover movement—a fast, chunky metal-hardcore hybrid. Crossover didn’t appeal to most of the forward thinkers who constituted punk’s first two waves. By ’86, the punk-rock element of hardcore punk was gone, jettisoned by a new generation that just wanted something hard and fast. But some of the old guard recognized the changing tide.
“In Slayer and Metallica, I really did see the baton handed down,” said Mike Watt in Steven Blush’s American Hardcore book.67 “Those bands added a technical edge that might’ve made it even more powerful, even though they ended up just diluting it. Those bands wanted to build on the [Black] Flag vibe.”
From that point on, plenty of metal and punk kids were drinking water from the same well.
“Hardcore and metal are more similar today than they’ve ever been,” says Throwdown’s Dave Peters. “If you go back and listen to a hardcore record from 1986 and a metal record from 1986, you’re going to find that a hardcore band from today sounds more like the metal record. Hardcore bands now sing about doom and the apocalypse, and a handful of metal bands are more on the personal side.”
By the end of that three-album run, Slayer was big enough to headline amphitheaters and small arenas. Their sound was bigger, too. While writing the Reign in Blood demos, the hot-handed Hanneman had planted the seeds for Slayer’s departure from pure speed. In addition to unused punk riffs, the Reign demos had clean bits that would turn up as the slow-death intros to “South of Heaven,” “Spill the Blood,” and “Seasons in the Abyss.” Seasons saw the band add a sludgy element that was slower and heavier than Black Sabbath. And then Slayer’s sound was set in stone.
“Their forte, for me, is when Jeff and Kerry are double-riffing on the slow, Satanic, heavy shit,” says Glenn Danzig. “That says so much mor
e to me than the thrashy part.”
The thrashy part was important, though. The band’s collective performance on Reign set a standard for the nascent forms of extreme music.
“With Reign in Blood, they totally set the bar for all the death metal bands that came later,” says Metal on Metal host Bill Peters. “They put the death in death metal. There were bands that were playing what could be considered death metal at the time. But after that album, you had to play that fast, play that good, and sound that good.”
In the years since Slayer let loose Reign in Blood, a battalion of metal musicians have recorded albums that are faster and more technically impressive. For example, Behemoth’s The Apostasy—a thoroughly devastating 2007 album by the Polish death-metal warriors—sounds like a solid hour of Reign’s most exacting skill tricks. But for all of their instrumental precision, even the most carpal-tunnel-collapsing death and Swedish metal records lack Reign in Blood’s grab-you-by-the neck rock-and-roll groove. And no one conjures big-screen images like Hanneman and King did.
The difference between Slayer and the bands that followed is like the difference between Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park: Building on the groundbreaking advances from T2, Jurassic Park is a superior technical achievement. But rampaging photorealistic dinosaurs can’t compare to the narrative power of two humanoid killing machines emptying clips into each other in a shopping mall’s narrow back hallway, then grappling through concrete walls, with the future of the human race on the line.
Terminator 2 and Reign in Blood are as sophisticated as they need to be. They represent a tipping point beyond which we find only diminishing returns, where the medium becomes the message. What came after might be slicker and flashier, but T2 and Reign simply kick more ass.
Reign in Blood’s rough predecessor, Hell Awaits, is the equivalent of the first Terminator. Unlike that violent film franchise, Slayer has never rebooted with an all-new lineup. And the band has never made an album comparable to Terminator 3—a wholly ignorable outing that fails to improve on a single facet of its forerunners. Therein lies Slayer’s greatness.
Notes, Asides, and Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and attributions in this book are from original interviews conducted by the author between March 2007 and January 2008 (and appear in present tense). The author also conducted Kerry King interviews in January 2004 and January 2007. Jim Root’s and Trevor Phipps’s interviews are from July 2006. Philip Anselmo’s interview is from January 2004.
Some articles cited are from collectors’ personal archives, and were only preserved in partial form, without full publishing date, number, title, or author. All retrievable information follows.
1: But I’m a thrash guy, so take that for what it’s worth; Iron Maiden’s great, too. And that’s not to say anything against Darkness Descends.
2: Viewed online August 18, 2006 at editor Dave DiMartino’s blog: http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-SDSWyN41erCbQ5NZk26gOTPpZo_Tig--?cq=1&p=353.
3: Gross, Joe. “Essentials: Thrash Metal.” Spin, July 2007, p. 104.
4: Sound Opinions no. 36, air date August 5, 2006. Available online at http://www.soundopinions.org/audio.html. Episode: http://audio.soundopinions.org/podcasts/sooppodshow36.mp3.
5: Leighton, Anne. “West Coast Crunchers Go for the Throat With Reign in Blood.” Hit Parader, May 1987, p. 65.
6: “Unholy Smoke.” June 14, 2006. Viewed online December 9, 2007 at http://citybeat.com/2006-06-14/music.shtml.
7: Krgin, Borivoj. “Slayer: The Drummer Speaks.” Metal Maniacs, 1991, p. 13.
8: Konow, David. Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal. NY: Three Rivers Press, 2002, p. 231.
9: Bennett, J. “Seasons in the Abyss: An Exclusive Oral History of Slayer.” Decibel, August 2006, p. 67.
10: Walters, Barry. “The King of Rap.” Village Voice, November 4, 1986, pp. 22, 19.
11: Hirschberg, Lynn. “The Music Man.” The New York Times Magazine. September 2, 2007. Viewed online September 2, 2007 at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html.
12: Kot, Greg. “Behind the Scenes: Producer Rick Rubin Talks About Working with Johnny Cash, Beastie Boys, and Slayer, Among Others.” Chicago Tribune. July 4, 2004, p. 10.
13: Walters, p. 25.
14: Gueraseva, Stacy. Def Jam, Inc.: Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, and the Extraordinary Story of the World’s Most Influential Hip-Hop Label. NY: One World/Ballantine/Random House Publishing Group, 2005, p. 28.
15: Walters, p. 25.
16: Walters, p. 22.
17: Gueraseva, p. 34.
18: Walters, p. 20.
19: Binelli, Mark. “The Guru.” Rolling Stone, September 22, 2005, p. 82.
20: Binelli, p. 76.
21: Mojo’s May 2006 issue ranked Buckley’s Grace as the top Modern Rock Classic of All Time. In the February 2006 issue of Q, readers voted it #13 album of all time.
22: Gueraseva, pp. 56, 57, 10.
23: That CMJ show featured Slayer, Megadeth, and Bad Brains. Conflicting accounts do and don’t have the Beastie Boys serving as emcees for the evening.
24: Bowcott, Nick. “Survival of the Sickest.” Guitar World, 1994.
25: Mastering anecdote from Nussbaum’s “Slayer’s Tom Araya: A Beat Boy From Hell?” Metal Mania, April 1987, p. 64. The article says the band finished the mastering in a single Sunday, but Wallace and Araya say a one-day finish sounds wrong.
26: Lee, Cosmo. “Visions of the Beast: Metal’s Mythmakers.” Stylus. June 11, 2007. Viewed online August 9, 2007 at http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/visions-of-the-beast-metals-mythmakers.htm. Expanded version online at www.InvisibleOranges.com.
27: “In Nomine Slayer.” Metal Hammer, 1987.
28: Nobody in the band recalls showing Carroll’s Reign cover to his mother, but there’s a lot they don’t remember about the period.
29: Gueraseva, p. 65.
30: Tipper Gore’s husband is Al Gore. Given Florida’s high concentration of metal fans and Bush’s 500-vote victory, it’s worth wondering whether lingering resentment toward the PMRC cost Gore the 2000 presidential election.
31: Stim, Rich. “Slayer: Reign in Blood.” Spin, September 1986, p. 32.
32: Gueraseva, p. 70.
33: Yetnikoff, Walter. With David Ritz. Howling at the Moon. New York: Broadway, 2004, p. 9.
34: Gueraseva, p. 84.
35: Schindler’s client, Def Jam, now owed CBS another album. Slayer’s move off the Columbia-Def Jam roster made room for Public Enemy.
36: Walters, p. 21.
37: Walters, p. 24.
38: Gueraseva, p. 85.
39: c.f. Newcleus, “Jam on It.” Worst. Song. Ever.
40: On other calls, Pete Nice would pretend to be Lombardo.
41: Shocklee had worked at a metal-heavy Record World, where he was the sole black guy on an all-headbanger staff. Public Enemy’s elaborate production was influenced by classic-rock studio monsters Pink Floyd and Yes. The “Angel” loop wasn’t P.E.’s only debt to thrash. Their dissonant disestablishmentarianism was influenced by King’s former bandmate, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine. Says Shocklee: “Public Enemy’s whole concept, to me, came from Megadeth. Megadeth made one record that fucked my entire head up: Peace Sells … But Who’s Buyin’? That shit is crazy.”
42: Kaye, Don. “Slayer: Hell Was Never So Much Fun.” Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal no. 1, November 1987, p. 9.
43: Testa, Fabio. “… But I Like ’Em.” Metal Mania, December 1987, p. 34.
44: Kerrang! October 2–15, 1986.
45: Constable, Dave. “Let It Bleed.” Metal Forces no. 19, 1986.
46: Doe, Bernard. “Let It Bleed.” 1987, King Diamond cover, pp. 28–29.
47: Rolling Stone no. 489–490, December 18, 1986, p. 84.
48: Kaye, Don. “Top 20 Thrash Metal Albums of All Time (So Far)” Creem Close-Up: Thrash Metal no. 1, November 1987, p. 65.
49: “We Blame the Parents!” p. 28.
> 50: Spin, July 2005, p. 88.
51: Enter into the realm of skatin’: Gross nailed it. Before “thrash” was a much-abused musical adjective and a metal genre, it was a skate term, and so it remained. Recalls Earth Crisis/Freya/Path of Resistance frontman Karl Buechner: “I had Reign in Blood on a tape. I used to have a [boom] box that I’d put in my backpack and turn it up as loud as it would go, and I’d get on my skateboard and bomb hills. I had a huge half-pipe in my yard, so we were always looking for music that would amp us up. And there was nothing faster and harder than Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss.”
52: Mudrian, Albert. “Reign in Blah.” Seattle Weekly, November 19, 2003. Viewed online December 9, 2007: http://www.seattleweekly.com/2003-11-19/music/reign-in-blah.php.
53: Bennett, J. “Who’ll Stop the Reign?” Decibel, November 2004, p. 47.
54: Binelli, p. 84.
55: Ibid.
56: The Greatest: 40 Greatest Metal Songs. Vh1. 2006.
57: “Slayer Frontman Comments on Grammy Win.” Blabbermouth.net, February 11, 2008. Viewed February 23, 2008: http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=90488.
58: “Auschwitz.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org. Viewed October 6, 2007: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005189.
59: Ibid.
60: Needs, Kris. “Slayer: Penultimate Amputation.” Creem Close-up: Metal Rock ‘N’ Roll. March 1987, p. 57.
61: Nussbaum, p. 64.
62: Testa, p. 34.
63: Testa, p. 10.
64: Neil Gaiman’s “Raining Blood” available in his 2006 collection Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders (P.S.) (Paperback edition 2007, by Harper Perennial).
65: This author told Hanneman his original idea for “Raining Blood” sounded cool, and he should still use it. If you see him, you tell him, too.
Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) Page 14
