Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (15 page)

Reign in Blood
opens with humanity’s worst-case-scenario (to date). “Angel of Death” is the kind of explicit reminder you won’t get from the Arcade Fire, Radiohead, or some emo singer who thinks life in modern America is a series of sad, overwhelming events. Slayer warn us: When authority goes wrong, your entire family can be slaughtered, their bones crushed to dust, and forgotten in mud.

Hell Awaits
took ninety long seconds to grab your throat and squeeze.
Reign in Blood
hits the road in fifth gear. From the first second, stereo blasts of percussive guitar and bass drive so hard it’s not clear the drums haven’t kicked in until Dave Lombardo’s cymbals ride in like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse.

“You can’t top the beginning of ‘Angel of Death,’” says Nuclear Assault’s Dan Lilker. “It’s like getting on the roller coaster.”

Then Tom Araya delivers one of heavy metal’s great screams, and follows it with lyrics that—coincidentally—give it some context. The shriek doesn’t have the artful nuance of a Rob Halford hellion cry, but not many moments better embody heavy metal’s primal aggression.

“It’s a perfect scream for that song,” says Beyond Fear singer Tim “Ripper” Owens. “For him, I don’t think it was much of a skill [move]. I think he’d be the first to admit it. I like his singing. He’s mastered it. Years ago, it was pretty heavy, but now, it’s really melodic too. He’s got a pretty cool tone.”

“When the high-pitched scream comes in, it’s so badass,” says Municipal Waste frontman Tony Foresta. “When you’re driving your car, how many times have you almost wrecked your shit when that comes on?”

The lyrics that follow make the moment’s effect change from awesome to ghastly: “Auschwitz, the meaning of pain / The way that I want you to die.” “Angel of Death” finds Hell in our world.

If the conventional notion of Hell does exist, imagine the organizational structure it would require. You’d need military-scale logistics to maintain an entire dimension of fire and brimstone, where condemned souls are punished for all eternity. Someone would have to assign sinners to their designated circles. If you don’t keep an eye on the flatterers, one of the shifty bastards is going to crawl out of the lake of human excrement and hide in a cave as soon as the demon on duty turns its head. If Hell exists, you need physical infrastructures: fences, barbed wire, quarters, trenches, armed guards. Not to mention a clear shift schedule. And the place would stink of fire, excrement, and burning human flesh. If Hell is real, it’s probably a lot like Auschwitz.

Reign in Blood
starts with a narrative from what is one of the nadirs of human history: the Nazi Holocaust, the systematic murder of millions of Catholics, Communists, disabled people, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists—and, far more than any other group, six million Jews. Poland’s Auschwitz was one of 20,000 Nazi death camps, a black hole of death where an estimated 1.1 million of the camp’s 1.3 million prisoners were killed—960,000 of them Jewish. Josef Mengele was part of the greeting committee.
⁵⁸

A summary by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
mildly summarizes Mengele’s activities: “At Auschwitz … SS physicians carried out medical experiments. They conducted pseudoscientific research on infants, twins, and dwarfs, and performed forced sterilizations, castrations, and hypothermia experiments on adults. The best-known of these physicians was SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele.”
⁵⁹
Due to his extensive violations of the Hippocratic Oath—in which physicians swear to do no harm—history often deprives Mengele the title “doctor.” At Auschwitz, his nickname was “The Angel of Death.”

Slayer’s “Angel of Death” wobbles from third-person (in which Hanneman condemns Mengele and his practices) to first-person narrative from the Nazi. Hanneman catalogs the terrors the Angel of Death inflicted: “Surgery with no anesthesia…. Pumped with fluid inside your brain…. Burning flesh drips away…. Frigid cold cracks your limbs…. Sewn together, joining heads…. Sickening ways to achieve the holocaust…. Rancid Angel of Death flying free.”

With the Soviet army closing in, the Nazis fled Auschwitz in early 1945. As did many other Germans and Nazis, he fled to South America, where he hid until his drowning death in 1979.

Graphic and disturbing, “Angel of Death” is controversial from every angle. The song caused a stir because Hanneman didn’t spend the entire five minutes condemning Mengele. (The guitarist wrote the lyrics and music, but the fact that guy singing “Destroying without mercy / To benefit the Aryan race” was named Araya didn’t help.)

Hanneman knew the subject matter was provocative, but he’s still incredulous when it’s taken as a pro-Nazi song.

“Just read the lyrics,” says Hanneman. “Writing that, I wasn’t going to state the obvious. That’s like talking down
to whoever’s reading it. I think they know he’s a bad guy. I don’t have to say, ‘Angel of Death / Bad guy.’ That would be stupid. I thought it was a great documentary.”

For a generation whose parents who remembered World War II, Nazi imagery was an easy card to play when you wanted to be transgressive. Sid Vicious famously sported a swastika shirt. The Dead Boys paraded around in Third Reich uniforms. Black metal would eventually develop a right-wing Nazi subset that adored the song—much like Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White”—for all the wrong reasons. “Angel of Death” wasn’t unprecedented; it’s a narrative like the Ramones’ “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” but with more detail, and on a diabolical scale. And it names names.

Rubin, born and raised Jewish, didn’t think the song was anti-Semitic. “I did not find it offensive,” he says.

People who have read the lyrics and been to Auschwitz don’t think the song makes light of its sinister subject matter. Born after Vietnam ended, Unearth frontman Trevor Phipps thinks “Angel of Death” has educational value.

“That song was the one that hit me hardest,” says Phipps. “[Slayer have] always tried to tackle subjects that are heavy, whether it’s myth or it’s real. As a kid, I had no idea what [Hanneman via Araya] was talking about. In 2002, touring Europe for the first time, we went to Auschwitz. That was a tougher experience than I thought it would be. It’s very eerie, just to combine the lyrics of that song with the gray feeling that you get when you’re there.”

The song isn’t just a eye-opener to wide-eyed twenty-somethings. Helmet mainman Page Hamilton, 47, has studied history and Slayer. He’s seen Auschwitz.

“I’ve never experienced a place that’s so spiritually and emotionally charged,” says Page Hamilton. “You can’t turn it into a news article or a History Channel documentary. You have to
feel
the souls that were lost there. It’s sort of beyond description. But the fact that they tried to convey that horror, I think they really get it across in the music. It’s a heavy thing to talk about. I think it’s a great album. It’s art.”

“Angel of Death” is bleaker than the news—when was the last time you heard about Darfur on TV? And it’s more extreme than most heavy metal lyrics.

“‘Angel of Death,’ the greatest death metal song every written,” says former Dark Angel drummer-songwriter Gene Hoglan. “Lyrically, no song can ever touch that song. It told a great story, and it’s terrifying. Nobody had anything as extreme and brutal as that.”

For most Americans, the history lesson is an academic point. Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz grew up in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe, where death camps and Gulags are a fresh memory, and Auschwitz is still a word that pushes buttons. As the descendent of Romani Gypsies, he enjoyed the song more before he learned English.

“It’s a totally ugly topic,” says Hütz. “Slayer writing about Auschwitz qualifies as a disturbing vehicle for a disturbing message. A lot of metal bands, there’s this comic-book horror, and their darkness is not real. Slayer doesn’t have that.”

The song’s famous music has overshadowed its controversy. Its speed, seminal moments, and conceptual content make it classic.

After the second chorus, the drums and vocals drop away for a guitar breakdown that’s the opposite of a solo: Instead of putting the pedal to the metal, King and Hanneman slow
down, sliding into a
must-mosh-now
guitar break that Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher calls a “devil disco.” Before a shadow guitar swoops in for a tandem groove, Lombardo fires a drum roll, turning what might have been a simple guitar trick into a 3D rhythmic experience.

“I play that two-second part over and over again,” says Henry Rollins. “It’s the perfect tease, like Lombardo’s stomping on your head. What a heavy groove they hit on that. That’s my favorite moment on that record. And I love the minutiae on records, those moments where I’m like, ‘
Oh, man
.’ James Brown’s got ’em. Led Zeppelin’s got ’em. And Slayer’s got a few.”

The song ends with multiple climaxes. King and Hanneman trade off incendiary solos like they’re firing Uzis at each other. When they can’t possibly push it any further, everything else falls away, and Lombardo takes the spotlight, feet pumping like a jackhammer, for the most influential moment in metal drumming. In that three-second break, the first two-thirds is all double-bass, and Lombardo connects twenty-eight times in a mere two seconds.

“What Slayer did, including that double-bass break on ‘Angel of Death,’ they did shit that no one else did, because they
could
,” says former Overkill drummer Rat Skates. “And you listen to that part, and you just knew:
Those are two bass drums
. That guy’s feet are fuckin’
flying
. It blew everyone’s mind.”

It still does.

“That specific part, it broke the speed barrier,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor. “It would make me happy when I heard it. Everybody at a Slayer show would wait to hear it. And everything else paled in comparison—until grindcore
happened. But grindcore, I think it loses something.”

Lombardo didn’t invent double-bass kicks. In 1986, drummers like Skates, Hoglan, and Anthrax’s Charlie Benante were all doing their share to refine the technique. But with that three-second solo, the innovation became a convention, and Lombardo would get principle credit. As Slayer fill-in drummer Anthony “T.J.” Scaglione would learn on the
Reign
tour, at the time, only two drummers had that combination of speed and strength: Hoglan and Lombardo.

“It’s not difficult drumming patterns, per se,” says Scaglione. “I think the key to it is the stamina aspect of it. Slayer was pretty much the fastest thing going at that point. You can play a drum pattern or any rhythmic pattern slow. But to speed it up and play it accurately is a challenge.”

Today, songs like Behemoth’s “Slaying the Prophets Ov Isa” feature a song-long double-bass barrage.

“It’s gotten to the point where it is more of an athletic-aerobic institution than it is a musical expression,” says Hoglan, who helped Lombardo figure out the intricacies of the double-bass kit. “Back in the day, you were just throwing in your double bass when the beat flipped over, or when you really want to kick it up a notch to really slam your point home. But now, it’s definitely used as ‘Hey look at me—look at what I can do for five minutes!’ It’s kind of robotic now.”

The kicks that launched a million kicks were a holdover from the
Hell Awaits
tour. The future of metal drumming was born in the most agonizingly dull convention of arena-rock excess: Slayer’s 1985 tour was the band’s last trek with an extended solo. Lombardo would pepper his four-minute spazz-outs with double-bass bursts. The roll caught King’s ear, and the guitarist decided it would work in a song. Subsequent
generations haven’t forgotten Lombardo.

“His double bass is amazing, super spot-on,” says Larry Herweg, drummer of Pelican. “His legs are like a machine. The Lombardo double bass drum fill in that song is classic. He is the king of super long drum fills.”

The band’s signature song, “Angel of Death” has been their show closer since 1988’s
South of Heaven
tour. (With two notable exceptions: In fall 2003, they played the entire
Reign
album; and in fall 2004, they closed with “Angel,” “Postmortem,” “Raining Blood,” and a blood rain dubbed “The Wall of Blood.”) Like a smoking Hendrix guitar, it’s the kind of performance no one wants to follow. King’s take on it is typically understated: “It ends my set and signals it’s party time.”

In Kerry King’s “Piece by Piece,” Slayer’s other guitarist writes about a different kind of human slaughterhouse. After “Angel of Death’s” hundred-mile-and-hour history lesson, the challenging time signature that kicks off the song disorients like an M.C. Escher staircase that simultaneously ascends and descends. The band wouldn’t play the complicated song live until 2003.

Singing King’s words, Araya starts off with an oblique reference to dismemberment: “Modulistic terror / A vast, sadistic feast/The only way to exit / Is going piece by piece.“

“Kerry likes to rhyme,” observes Hanneman. “I try not to, but it usually fits together where the words rhyme anyway. But I go out of my way not to rhyme.”

Filled with images of cannibalism and morbid taxidermy, the look at a serial killer’s body of work has a relative level
of sophistication, hinting at the unnamed narrator’s detached emotional state. In Slayer songs, killers are crazy, high, or religious.

The subject matter of “Piece by Piece” was a prescient choice. The song arrived before
Silence of the Lambs
made Hannibal Lector a household name. Jeffrey Dahmer had yet to be apprehended. And
Sin City
’s trophy-keeping cannibal Kevin wasn’t even on the drawing board yet.

Slayer wouldn’t film a real promotional video until their fifth album, 1990’s
Seasons in the Abyss
. They wanted to shoot a clip for their major-label debut. Not surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

‘We have all these ideas for the videos,” Araya told
Creem Metal
’s Kris Needs.
⁶⁰
“You’ll see some of the gruesomest videos ever! We’d cut someone’s head off, poke their eyes out, cut their ears off, pull their teeth out—you wouldn’t believe it. The video we’d come out with, nobody would want to show it on their station.”