I'm waiting for two separate arrivals at the front door, neither of whom will likely ring the bell, so I can't use my cans to listen, but I've spent hours and hours in the past with this album, and I'll go by that experience for now.
This is my first Slayer album, though I'm sure I caught the video for 'Seasons in the Abyss' on TV beforehand. This would have been sometime around '96, maybe '97, I picked up the CD in Tower when I was getting into heavier metal after classic Metallica (friend at school gave me tapes of Ride the Lightning and ...And Justice for All). I was trying out a lot around that time, I remember having a tape of Napalm Death's Scum and Cannibal Corpse's The Bleeding. So it should say something that Reign in Blood, recorded before them, still had such impact a decade after it was made.
And I think the reason it works so well is that it's not pure metal, it's cut with a huge amount of hardcore but not in the same way that 'crossover' bands were doing it in the mid '80s. By most if not all accounts that's down to Jeff Hanneman, who got the spirit of hardcore's aggressive sound and applied it to thrash seamlessly, unlocking its ferocity. All the elements of what was then the burgeoning thrash genre are there - the speed, the catchy driving riffs, the solos - but Hanneman's influence brought more dissonance to the distortion and overdrive. I mean, those duelling solos on 'Angel of Death'! That was 30 years ago and no one has done better than that. That's a fact.
It's a perfect opening track, too, because it set up fans of previous Slayer, who were already primed by the hardcore-inflected speed and rhythm of Hell Awaits, for an even punkier sound. It's an epic thrash metal track (none more metal than Tom Araya's scream at the beginning) that leads straight into a bunch of short sharp shocks - congratulations hesher, you're a punk now too!
Is it the start of death metal, too? It feels like it to me, even though I've read that there were bigger touchstones like Possessed and Venom and Celtic Frost and whatnot. But I feel like there's a direct line between the overt EC Comics imagery of these songs and the grotesqueries that would start churning out of Morrisound just a couple of years later.
This is my first Slayer album, though I'm sure I caught the video for 'Seasons in the Abyss' on TV beforehand. This would have been sometime around '96, maybe '97, I picked up the CD in Tower when I was getting into heavier metal after classic Metallica (friend at school gave me tapes of Ride the Lightning and ...And Justice for All). I was trying out a lot around that time, I remember having a tape of Napalm Death's Scum and Cannibal Corpse's The Bleeding. So it should say something that Reign in Blood, recorded before them, still had such impact a decade after it was made.
And I think the reason it works so well is that it's not pure metal, it's cut with a huge amount of hardcore but not in the same way that 'crossover' bands were doing it in the mid '80s. By most if not all accounts that's down to Jeff Hanneman, who got the spirit of hardcore's aggressive sound and applied it to thrash seamlessly, unlocking its ferocity. All the elements of what was then the burgeoning thrash genre are there - the speed, the catchy driving riffs, the solos - but Hanneman's influence brought more dissonance to the distortion and overdrive. I mean, those duelling solos on 'Angel of Death'! That was 30 years ago and no one has done better than that. That's a fact.
It's a perfect opening track, too, because it set up fans of previous Slayer, who were already primed by the hardcore-inflected speed and rhythm of Hell Awaits, for an even punkier sound. It's an epic thrash metal track (none more metal than Tom Araya's scream at the beginning) that leads straight into a bunch of short sharp shocks - congratulations hesher, you're a punk now too!
Is it the start of death metal, too? It feels like it to me, even though I've read that there were bigger touchstones like Possessed and Venom and Celtic Frost and whatnot. But I feel like there's a direct line between the overt EC Comics imagery of these songs and the grotesqueries that would start churning out of Morrisound just a couple of years later.