Slayer's Reign in Blood (33 1/3) (18 page)

Consider “Possum Kingdom,” the 1995 alt-rock song by the Toadies. The Texas one-hit wonders insist the song is not about vampires—though the lyrics read like a story about hungry bloodsuckers stalking the night. The single cracked the modern-rock top five and became an overexposed radio nugget, in no small part due to a catchy refrain, repeated over and over: “Do you wanna die?”

A brief hush transitions from “Postmortem” to “Raining Blood.” Wallace drops in the sounds of rain, and the scene shifts from a grisly death to the underworld. The three floor-tom hits that sounded like a dull rapping on the demo are now mythic booms, warning that Hell is just a doorway away. The album’s third signature drum moment, both simple and brilliant, is often imitated, never duplicated.

“Anyone who went to hardcore shows in the early 90s will remember how every hardcore band would do a Slayer medley or at least bust out the intro to ‘Raining Blood,’” says Converge’s Kurt Ballou. “The music of Slayer became the musical vernacular a generation of musicians used to communicate.”

Live, the intro has reared its head over the punk spectrum from Hatebreed to Sum 41. Sum frontman Deryck Whibley—an Island Def Jam artist—is one of the many music fans who doesn’t go for much metal, but tips his hat to Slayer.

“They wrote some really good songs for their genre,” says Whibley. “They had their own thing, and they’re original.”

“Raining Blood” lunges to life with its core riff, the ten most recognizable notes in metal, a diminished-scale run down the fretboard that’s the most badass guitar bit since Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf.” King helped finish the lyrics, but Hanneman wrote the soundtrack to
Reign
’s inaugural nightmare. (Like the drum intro, the all-time-great riff is nowhere nearly as impressive on the demo.)

At the core of Slayer’s tradition-flouting technique is the minor scale, intensified by use of
diabolus in musica
—in Latin, literally, “the devil in music.” Instinctively, Slayer’s guitarists had gravitated toward this dissonant tritone, which had once been banned from use in hymns because of its forboding sound. Legendary Ozzy guitarist Randy Rhoads used the interval often—it’s the sound that gives
Diary of a Madman
its grit. Conventional major scales can sound happy or triumphant. Diminished—or flattened—notes don’t.

“Minor notes, they’re why metal sounds so creepy and evil,” explains John Comprix, guitarist of Beyond Fear. “It’s those minor notes that make most people cringe, and make us [metal people] go, ‘
YEAH
’ and make us rage.”

On the
Reign
tour, Slayer opened most sets with the song, and often stormed directly into “Angel of Death”—two tunes they now save as the climax of their concerts. In retrospect, that set list was the equivalent of Springsteen opening a show with “Thunder Road” and following with “Born to Run.”

“Raining Blood” is King’s favorite
Reign
song to play live. With
diabolus in musica
in the air, all hell breaks loose.

“Wherever ‘Raining Blood’ comes in the set, it just electrifies the crowd,” says King. “People just shit when you hit the first few notes. Like Jesus Christ, it’s just guitar—settle down.”

The riff repeats four times, and Lombardo lets loose a ballistic double-bass gallop. Like the triple-hit intro, Hanneman had the basic idea, and Lombardo and Rubin fleshed it out. In the mix with the grinding riffs and Araya’s bedrock bass, Lombardo is a doomsday machine.

“Slayer’s a scary and dangerous band, even without the riffs and vocals,” says Throwdown’s Dave Peters. “I don’t think there’s a riff out there that’s scarier than ‘Raining Blood.’”

Though the two songs are linked, “Raining Blood” isn’t a direct continuation of the narrative from “Postmortem.” Talking to
Metal Mania
in 1987, Hanneman pointed to the central figure on
Reign
’s album cover, and said the album’s final song is about the guy with the goat head (though the song was completed before the cover).
⁶³

“It’s about this guy who’s in Purgatory ’cause he was cast out of Heaven,” said Hanneman. “He’s waiting for revenge and wants to fuck that place up.”

“The rest of the song explains what happens when he starts fucking people up,” added King. “The lyrics ‘Return to power draws near’ is because he’s waiting to get strong enough again to overthrow Heaven. And then ‘Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears’ is everybody’s blood flowing into him. So basically, ‘Raining Blood’ is all the angels’ blood falling on him.”

It’s a theologically muddled narrative. Some Christian
factions argue that Purgatory is essentially a waiting room between death and Heaven for souls who still need to clean up. St. Augustine said it was a place of hellacious fire. If the
Reign
cover represents Purgatory, then Hell must be unimaginably terrible; maybe, in fact, more like Auschwitz. But if you can get past the Purgatory issue, then Hanneman and King’s sweeping images like “abolish their rules made of stone” stand as some of metal’s greatest lyrical moments.

“‘Raining Blood,’ something about that song makes my skin ripple into goosebumps,” says Integrity’s Dwid Hellion. “It has a cinematic quality that takes me to a world similar to a Bosch painting.”

Araya, Hanneman, King, and Lombardo lock together for moments of mechanized fury, the kind that would later see fruition in Pantera. Just before the song’s climax, a one-
two-
one-
two
combination of chords crash like a series of controlled detonations, leading to the return of the song’s Satanic riff.

Magnificent gutbucket imagery is not unique to heavy metal’s horror aesthetic. We find scenes of spectacular carnage from ancient literature to movies: Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm. Kid Miracleman lays waste to London in
Miracleman
number fifteen, and dismembered limbs pour from the sky. In
Apocalypse Now
, Kilgore leads the Valkyrie helicopter raid. Jaguar Paw escapes a field of bodies in
Apocalypto
. Comanches descend on Captain White’s party in
Blood Meridian
, leaving a harvest of death. In
Macbeth
, Banquo’s final words are, “It will rain tonight,” and a trio of murderers advance on him when their leader utters “Let it come down.” Such a moment is the violent apogee of
Reign in Blood
.

“As evil and brutal as it was, there’s still hooks in there,” says Mastodon writer/drummer Brann Dailor. “You can’t
deny a hook, and ‘Raining Blood’ is a catchy song; that’s all there is to it. There’s melody in those songs, whether people want to admit it. It’s not all just about chugga-chugga. You’ve got to have the beauty and the beast in there; you can’t just have the beast.”

The song ends in a whammy bar free-for-all. The lyric sheets help identify which guitarist plays which solos in the other songs, but
Reign
’s final demonic twin assault is simply listed as “noise.” It’s more than random screeching; it’s a mad-dog solo, but moved to the song’s end. Like their other bloody-fingertip fretboard freakouts, elegant it isn’t.

“There’s dudes that are better—Joe Satriani, Steve Vai,” says Andy Williams, guitarist of Every Time I Die. “But they can’t write a song. Listen to ‘Raining Blood.’ It’s a well written song. Songwriting, riffing, soloing—[Hanneman and King are] not virtuosos; they’re not going to rip a sweeping arpeggio. But their solos are memorable. It’s not just noodling.”

A beat after the jagged solos reach a climax, the album ends with one last significant sound effect: The rain that began the song culminates in a thunderclap explosion, and
Reign
fades to black with the sounds of raining blood.

“At the end of this album, you feel like you’ve been taken on this trip,” says Helmet’s Page Hamilton. “And the rain starts in the background, and you feel it’s time to start over again.”

From the team that made the record to its fans, most of the people who discussed
Reign in Blood
have trouble picking a favorite song. Or songs. They typically list “Angel of Death,” “Criminally Insane, “Reigning Blood,” two others, and give up.

“I could put on
Master of Puppets
and I’d listen to three songs and switch to something else,” says Ill Bill. “When I’d listen to
Reign in Blood
, I’d listen to it from beginning to end. It
was twenty-nine minutes of crushing perfection.”

The most common observation about
Reign
is that it’s a piece, a single-serving record with ten parts, all essential.

“It’s what a metal record should be, front to back,” says Shadows Fall guitarist Matt Bachand. “It doesn’t drag out. It just gets in, kicks your ass, and it’s gone before you know it. That’s what metal’s supposed to be: It’s supposed to be aggressive, fast-paced, and it leaves you destroyed.”

Even the chill cat who produced Johnny Cash’s
My Mother’s Hymn Book
and Justin Timberlake’s “Another Song” thinks the record is still pretty hot.

“Slayer is a radical band,” says Rubin. “
Reign in Blood
sounds as thrilling today as the day we recorded it. I can think of few albums packing the punch of
Reign in Blood
.”

“Postmortem” and “Raining Blood” might be metal’s most vivid double feature. After taking in
Reign in Blood
’s album art, it takes some imagination to listen to the last song and think of anything far-removed from artist Larry Carroll’s picture of the underworld.

Tori Amos, however, has some imagination. The singer-pianist recorded “Raining Blood” on her 2001 covers album,
Strange Little Girls
. In her hands, the five-minute maelstrom stretches out a minute and a half longer. Performed with just her voice and a piano, “Raining Blood” turns into a slow, gothic drone that—make no mistake—is still “a very angry read,” in Amos’s words.

“At that time, it was before 9/11, but the Taliban was in power,” explains Amos. “And what they were doing to the women there was being written about in the
New York Times
and other major outlets. A musician that I work with was playing me ‘Raining Blood,’ and I just saw the picture of this
woman’s beautiful vulva bleeding over, into the mouths of the Taliban. And they needed to drink the blood of the dark goddess, who was so angered by their disrespect…. I think what [Slayer] do is brilliant.”

As Amos prepared her tour for that album, “Raining Blood” took on a life of its own. Author Neil Gaiman—best known for the
Sandman
graphic novels and the fantasy-novel-turned-movie
Stardust
—wrote a series of very short stories inspired by each of the record’s songs. Coincidentally, like “Angel of Death,” part of Gaiman’s “Raining Blood” takes place during World War II: Gestapo soldiers shoot a pregnant woman and bury her in an unmarked grave.
⁶⁴

The song has also been adapted and recorded in numerous varying versions. Techno-squad Concord Dawn dropped the tune into drum and bass. Poland’s Vader cut a straightforward modern-metal version; it doesn’t capture the song’s subtleties as well as “Lloviendo Sangre,” a faithful Spanish adaptation by Buenos Aires’s Serpentor. Hinds’ unplugged, instrumental version sounds more like Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss.” Rubin himself looped the chopping chords from the original for rapper Lil Jon’s “Stop Fuckin Wit Me.” Of the “Rain” variations, best of all is Hanneman’s abandoned original vision.

“The song ‘Raining Blood’ was going to be about a killer,” says Hanneman. “He doesn’t start out as a killer. He just gets mad at his girlfriend or some girl he meets. He loses his mind. He kills this woman. And it happened to be raining that night. And the last thing he sees, he leaves the crime scene, he turns around and looks, and he can see her blood going in with the water. And after that, he’s haunted. Every time it rains, he sees blood coming down. And nobody else does, obviously—he’s fuckin’ nuts. So
every time it rains, he goes out and kills again.”
⁶⁵

Reign in Blood
ends with the sounds of thunder, and of rain smacking into the wet earth. Sixteen years prior, Black Sabbath’s first album—arguably ground zero for heavy metal as a distinct genre—had opened with the sound of a storm. As Slayer’s crowning achievement draws to a close, the first wave of thrash metal reaches its high-water mark. Metal comes full circle, rain to rain, thunder crashing, blood pouring.

“Metrically, the songs are wild, shattering the conventions of the time and genre, jumping from time signature to time signature—as well as there being sophisticated tempo juxtapositions.

“Harmonically, there’s a real shift for Slayer away from the diatonic preponderance of
Show No Mercy
—and to a lesser extent
Haunting the Chapel
and
Hell Awaits
.
Reign in Blood
features chromaticism to the furthest degree, and the melodic constructs follow this aesthetic, with a superficially monotonous vocal delivery that, on deeper examination, reveals a subtle and slithering sense of intonation.

“The guitar solos are incredible mini-compositions within the larger framework, and showcase a very fluid notion of melody and harmony against the modal and/or pivot pitch support underneath.

“The rapid starts and stops really tug on the emotions. Rhythmically, it’s relentless. Melodically, it’s a study in severe refinement. I think we can all agree the lyrics are classic meditations on evil.”

“Fucking Slayer rules. They’ll always rule. That’s just the way it is.”

It’s tricky, quantifying whether a band is truly great. Here’s one question to ask when evaluating a group: Have they made
three
great albums? Slayer has.
Reign in Blood
was the first installment of an informal trilogy from the
Reign
team: Slayer’s classic lineup playing, Rubin producing, Wallace mixing (and later coproducing), and Carroll providing covers. After 1988’s
South of Heaven
and 1990’s
Seasons in the Abyss
, Slayer were firmly established as metal titans.