How do you start a review of Slayer? It is after all, fucking Slayer. While so many of their peers have gone soft to the point of being unlistenable, Slayer remains fucking Slayer. Sure there may have been a period after drummer Dave Lombardo left the band where their music seemed, well, uninspired, but they never went soft. They never broke out an acoustic guitar and wrote a power ballad or vied for mainstream success, instead they remained fucking Slayer and as a result have become living legends. The band’s tenth studio album World Painted Blood shows no signs of softness either, if anything they sound more razor sharp than ever, offering up songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on the band’s watershed album Reign in Blood.
Following the band’s masterful Christ Illusion, the first album to include Lombardo since their late 80s early 90s hat-trick of Reign, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss, World Painted Blood forgoes much of the midtempo style that characterized Illusion, with the slash and burn speed of Reign. It is clear that Lombardo not only deserves a mountain of credit for providing the lightening speed backbone of the band that was so sorely missing during his absence, but also its ominous power. Remember, it was his tom beats that made “Raining Blood” sound so damn damnable. Throughout the album he plays at the height of his powers bashing out blast beats and double bass hits that sound like the devil’s army on the move.
The other major star here is bassist/vocalist Tom Araya’s voice. He hasn’t sounded this intense since, well, Reign. Seeing Slayer in concert last summer I noticed that he chose to forego his infamous scream that kicks off “Angel of Death.” My friend Andrew noted it as well and we speculated that he was getting old and probably had to save his voice. Now I know what he was saving it for. Araya is a master vocalist for the speed/thrash metal genre. He can insert the most awkward phrases into the slice and dice compositions of guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman and make it sound natural, as well as absolutely bone chilling. His lyric about incestuous fathers and cunted daughters from “South of Heaven” still remains for me the most evil lyric ever, not only because of the content, but the delivery. World Painted Blood finds Araya at the very top of his game. Belting out narratives of the apocalypse, anarchy and serial killers, Araya renders anguished horror out of the delivery of lyrics like “My birthright is murder,” on album highlight “Beauty Through Order,” which eventually deteriorates into barks of “Birthright! Murder!” that mirrors the psychosis of the song’s serial killing protagonist.
None of this is to say that King and Hanneman aren’t pulling their weight. They both sound sharper than ever. It is amazing that they show no signs of slowing down in their writing or execution. No one is as clean and as fast and as clear as either of these two giants. As usual, both men split up the songwriting duties. King’s songs are usually deemed the more “metal” of the band, while Hanneman’s are usually cited for their punk influence. Here Hanneman has the upper hand by one song, which may account for the speed to midtempo ratio here. Hanneman’s “Unit 731” and the instant classic “Psychopathy Red” fly by at lightening speed. King gets his speed on as well, his song “Snuff” rips as fast as anything Hanneman contributes here. The best songs on the album though are those that combine the midtempo metal of King with the speed of Hanneman. The aforementioned “Beauty Through Order” is an absolute masterwork from the band. Told from the point of view of the first known female serial killer, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, it combines the band’s intense speed with the dark chasms that sound as if they open all the way to hell that come into view when the band pulls back enough to let the guitar and drums slow or come to a standstill.
Lyrically the band returns to their roots as well. Illusion was almost a political manifesto taking to task the Bush administration’s horrors in much the same way Seasons in the Abyss was an indictment of the Reagan era. Here we get “Americon,” and “Public Display of Dismemberment,” both songs dealing with political issues, the former a very pointed critique of American foreign policy and the politics of fear, the latter a savage account of societal collapse when government fails. For the most part though the lyrics deal with death and disease on a grand apocalyptic scale and the real-life serial killers that roam the shadows picking off the unsuspecting. Bathory and Russian killer Andrei Chikatilo provide the inspiration this time around. What is noticeably absent from this album are the band’s broadsides against religion. Whereas Illusion gave us some of the best blasphemy in years, atheist King only contributes one “stab right between the eyes” of religion with the superb “Worldwide Hate.” Interestingly Ayara, noted family man and practicing Catholic, sneaks in a couple of odes to his god. He turn in the titular track that not only doesn’t deny god, but could be interpreted as a rendering of the Book of Revelations. No worries of Slayer every becoming Stryper, but it is an interesting development for a band so tied to satanic imagery as a purposeful affront to religion in the advancement of atheism.
In the end this is classic Slayer through and through. There are a couple of songs that are growers, and maybe “Americon” is a little too straightforward musically than we want or expect from Slayer, but that is minor quibbling. World Painted Blood is an album that a new fan could come to and be changed forever, just as so many longtime fans were back in the day by Reign and Heaven. It is also an album for the veterans of the Satanic Wehrmacht to listen to with glee and shout “FUCKING SLAYER!!!”
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