Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (17 page)

“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.”

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. His 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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 lacking 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.