Music Review: Slayer "Reign In Blood"

Heavy metal has a way of tackling tender subjects in a way that is both impossibly brash and offensive and yet somehow appropriate. What better genre to embody the horror of, say, the Holocaust than metal? Through the lightning fast riffs, thundering drum fills and wailing lyrical delivery, good metal is the audio equivalent of primal scream therapy. It's a place you can go for a little while to confront your demons and then come out of the experience stronger and more at peace.

At least that's how it works for me, and there's no album that better epitomizes this dichotomy of the sacred and the profane than Slayer's Reign In Blood. The album was the band's major breakthrough, and amazingly (considering the nature of its contents) the album broke the Billboard Top 100 albums, reaching number 94. The album went on to seal the band's legacy in the realm of metal and has gone on to reach legendary status amongst metal and music aficionados in general. Kerrang! magazine called the album "the heaviest album of all time."

Existing as a sort of bridge between punk and metal, the songs on Reign In Blood are densely packed explosions of metal. Furiously fast throughout, the album was pared down to the raw bedrock, leaving it clocking in at a mean and lean 29 minutes. But length has always been the enemy of music this punishing (after all, how much can an audience be expected to endure?) so in this case shorter is better. From the first strains of the Auschwitz inspired "Angel of Death" (a harrowing and horrific cataloging of Nazi atrocities) through to the final raging blasts of "Raining Blood," the album rushes by and when it's over, one finds themselves dazed and stunned, wondering what just happened and (if you're like me) looking forward to taking the journey again.

I realize that all of the adjectives used to describe the album up to this point haven't exactly sounded inviting. If someone asked you, "Hey, want to do something both brutal AND punishing?" you would likely laugh in their face and say no thanks. But such is the lexicon of metal - I can't very well call this album "toe-tappingly tuneful" because it isn't. It's metal, and it's designed to allow the listener to shake their sillies out. And that's what it does, masterfully, for 29 minutes. It's a breathtaking musical ride, and one I wholeheartedly invite you to take. It could just change your life.

Reign In Blood is available in JPL's CD collection.