Music is not immune from this concept. If we look back through the history of rock and metal, we see a continual shift toward the extremes. What was obviously metal in the 70s is barely hard rock to some people today, and the origins of black and death metal sound quaint when compared to thinks that even get played on the radio these days. When we are dealing with genres that need to push the envelope and shock the listeners, bringing them something new and heavier to lay claim to their importance on the evolutionary ladder, this becomes inevitable. It is why Five Finger Death Punch is one of the biggest radio bands in the country, and not wasting away playing to VFW halls full of people drinking PBR because getting drunk on a bargain is the whole point.
No band embodies this more than Slayer, who went from being the most terrifying band in the 'mainstream' to one that is almost a family-friendly corporate machine. To think that the band who sang about the Holocaust would have products emblazoned with their logo being sold all over the place is the sort of thing that makes you question is any of the art we ever consumed was even the slightest bit honest. That might be the metal version, but we've seen the same thing with Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Snoop, and however more who have either mellowed or sold out to the point of being the inverse of when you first heard Bob Saget tell 'The Aristocrats'.
Forty years ago, Slayer made their definitive statement with "Reign In Blood". In a mere twenty-nine minutes, they re-wrote the blueprint for how metal was supposed to sound, and how far bands could go without going too far. They also wrote the beginning of their own ending with the album, which took three decades to play out, but ultimately proved fatal.
The key to all of this lies in the fingers of Rick Rubin, who for perhaps the only time in his life (along with Trouble's self-titled album) made an impact as a producer. Slayer had been writing long songs inspired by the NWOBHM, drenched in the reverb of the decade, which sounded like we might imagine the echo of hell would entail. Rubin heard something different, and shoved our faces right into the fire. He stripped the band's writing down to the barest of bones, and turned off all of the effects that sat between us and the aural assault of the amps. "Reign In Blood" is the first truly dry metal album, turning the guitars into razorblades that cut through the air faster and sharper than anything we had heard before. Other bands were heavy with volume, but no one was heavy in the way "Reign In Blood" tried to break your nose with guitar riffs.
The album's sequence is perfect, opening and closing with the only songs that stand apart from the whole. "Angel Of Death" blasts out of the speakers with a furious rage, the clarity of the recording making the speed even more terrifying. By the time Tom Araya lets out his inhuman shriek, we're already through at least one circle of hell. As the song tells about the atrocities of the Holocaust, Slayer has found the message that hell is only as evil as our own imaginations can invent. It's a sly twist of psychology, and the single smartest moment the band would ever have. The song doesn't even need 'the riff' that comes in with the bridge and twists Kerry and Jeff's fingers into a hypnotic groove swaying to the tides of the river Styx.
Closing with "Raining Blood", Slayer turns the song into a frenetic heartbeat that slowly finds itself arresting. When the thunder enters, the storm has already gotten too close to run from, and all we can do is assess the damage. In the twenty minutes between these moments, Slayer ripped through eight more tracks that barely stopped to note that one had bled into the next. While that could be considered a flaw of songwriting, in this case it was exactly the point. Slayer were not songwriters in the classical sense, they were a band proving that metal was as much about noise and attitude as composition. For anyone who ever complained that an album had a ballad, or a band had gone soft, Slayer was showing us what it meant to live life turned all the way up.
And yet, "Reign In Blood" was its own counter-revolution. After the record's time had come and gone, the question became what Slayer could do next. Rather than trying to get more extreme than the most extreme album yet made, they slowed down and tried to prove their skills as songwriters. By the time they were ready to reclaim their throne as the heaviest and most evil band out there, the metal world had passed them by. They made a terrible groove/nu-metal inspired album in "Diabolous In Musica" that had them taking punches rather than delivering them, and then Slayer gave up. They realized they could no longer compete with younger bands who grew up getting burnt out on "Reign In Blood", and so the only avenue of extremity left to them was that of stupidity. Kerry King especially devolved as a writer, and Slayer went from a band that catalogued atrocities to point out the evil inherent in men, to one that wrote a song threatening to beat someone up with the limbs from their own carcass. By that point, Slayer was done. They carried on for years, but the very idea of Slayer was dead.
What is most amazing about "Reign In Blood" is how forty years later it still sounds unique, timeless, and as crushing as anything that has ever been released. The album is the high water mark of extreme metal, because everything that came after was muffled by layers of effects or cartoonish excess. What is most terrifying is not the monsters that could lurk in the darkness, but rather the people turning on the lights.
Slayer knew that once, and perhaps only once.
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