SLAYER: Reign in Blood

Produced by Rick Rubin

Released: 1986

Slayer's third album is hailed by many as the ultimate thrash album, the one that somehow defines the genre and sets the benchmark for everything to follow. In truth, there's really only half an album here and Slayer made better records both before and after this. Reign in Blood's real notoriety stems from its energy and intensity, aspects which can't be denied, but for the most part this exists as extreme for extremity's sake. While it's a fact this is an album that bridges the gap between hardcore and metal like none before it and helped to lay the foundation for death metal, it's also probably fair to say that if Reign in Blood didn't contain two of the best thrash songs of all time, hardly anyone would ever listen to it.

By the time they went in to work on this album, Slayer was apparently "bored" with standard song-writing techniques and promptly dispensed with them, coming up with a bunch of tracks where the usual metal formulas really were thrown out the window. From the moment it began with the piercing scream that ranks as one of the best openings to any album ever, Reign in Blood just relentlessly bludgeoned the listener with an endless barrage of pure insanity. Riffs flew by so fast it was almost hard to tell where one ended and the next began. Tom Araya's vocals were a tuneless shout with little to no variation and all forms of real guitar soloing were replaced by a mishmash of frantic, thrown-together single-note repetition, dive-bombing and noise. Indeed, most of the album is closer to hardcore than it is to thrash, almost completely stripped of melody in an apparently ruthless quest for atonal dissonance and blinding pace.

A little bit too often on Reign in Blood, Slayer overplayed this, resulting in a mixed bag where speed and violence dominated. Songs like "Necrophobic" end before they've had a chance to get going and in "Jesus Saves" they try to fit too many lyrics into too small a space. Snatches of groove appeared but were gone too quickly to set, some songs have no real structure whatsoever and in more than one place Slayer seemed to be playing almost too fast for their own good. If it wasn't for Rick Rubin's instinctive production, a lot of this would have ended up as unlistenable garbage, a blur of guitar noise and screaming unfit for release. Slayer's apparent goal to out-extreme everyone had been achieved, even if it meant that Reign in Blood was the musical equivalent of an exploitation film, existing for the sake of intensity alone.

In light of the band's philosophy behind the album's intentions, it's somehow ironic that the two songs to most closely follow a standard structure are the ones that make Reign in Blood great. "Angel of Death" and "Raining Blood" are two of the greatest metal songs in history. The first piles on lyrical horror upon horror, a litany of gruesome imagery that presages the gore-grind phenomonon that would follow, winds down into an epic slow section that would later be sampled by Public Enemy and explodes again into chaos. Kerry King's inane "solo" is a bit of a let down after such a gargantuan build up, though. Finally, there's "Raining Blood", possibly Slayer's greatest contribution to metal: a menacing, sinister intro, furious, bruising riffage, Araya's demented vocals and a truly cataclysmic ending, the perfect way to round out an album that often sounds like total destruction.

In hindsight Reign in Blood lacks the majesty of Master of Puppets, the technical wizardry of Peace Sells... and the darkness of Darkness Descends, all of which came out earlier the same year. But it certainly set a new standard in extremity, spawned two incredible songs and paved the way for death metal and gore-core excess like no other release. And any album with a song like "Raining Blood" on it is a deadset classic.

1. Angel of Death
2. Piece by Piece
3. Necrophobic
4. Altar of Sacrifice
5. Jesus Saves
6. Criminally Insane
7. Reborn
8. Epidemic
9. Post Mortem
10. Raining Blood

Rating: 85%