Slayer

Tom Araya – vocals, bass
Jeff Hanneman – guitar
Kerry King – guitar
Paul Bostaph – drums

It’s been three years since Slayer last dropped a ton of original decibels on its faithful minions, three years since the world’s most grisly band terrorized rock & roll with its patented growl and seething thrash. Following a change of labels, Araya, Hanneman, King, and Bostaph — names that will live in infamy on the Devil’s shortlist of gnarly superstars — are back with Diabolus in Musica, their American/Columbia debut, another ballcrushing blast of confrontational über-noise. And so at last begins the next scene in the theater of hate that is Slayer.

“Yeah, I guess it’s a new beginning,” guitarist Kerry King, still the band’s tattoo-spangled straight talker, admits. “I think this record’s gonna do it for us. Then again,” he laughs, “I thought the last five would, too.” Diabolus in Musica is Slayer’s most visceral and evocative outing since 1990’s Seasons In The Abyss, a scorching new work that cleaves to the band’s original principles of anvil-heaviness, yet reaches out to looser and craftier musical terrain. Songs like “Scrum” and “Death’s Head” thunder with the red-hot brand of ‘Slayer’ emblazoned on their bellies, while “Love To Hate” is a complex cadre of bits stitched together featuring some prog-ish dual guitar figures to accompany King’s manic soloing. Further, “Overt Enemy” is a stomping homage to Slayer forbears Black Sabbath. Above it all, the band remains faithful to its fascination with violent, socially-skewed lyrics. On “Love to Hate,” for example, Araya sings, “Absolute reign a malevolent mind/Conceptions so vile in this bottomless soul/Shooting up hate, nothing beats the rush.” In the end, Diabolus in Musica is the inimitable work of a singular band, the same band who laid down Reign In Blood, the record that became a blueprint for neo-metal and a hair-raising apocalyptic manifesto of noise. Today, more than 15 years since coming together, Slayer still musters a surfeit of five-chord power, enough to scare the bejesus out of music fans the wor ld over.

“This record’s really important in keeping us on track for the future,” says Araya. “I’m confident it’ll come out and be everything we want it to be.” This time, though, the band hopes Diabolus in Musica will supersede the goals they’ve achieved for themselves in the past. Out of the nine Slayer records released, five have reached RIAA gold status. Not bad for a bunch of sarky outcasts who recorded their first album in a week with only $400 in their pockets. (That record, 1983’s watershed Show No Mercy, went on to sell 60,000 copies.) Tom Araya remembers back that far, and the tough-as-talons credo that would later become Slayer’s defining quality: “You only get one chance. If we didn’t do it when we had the chance we were fucked. So we took the chance and here we are.” When the dust settled, Slayer had become warlords of their very own hyper-evil music empire, a land impervious to the trends and whims of today’s changeable modern rock.

“For whatever reason,” King says, “we don’t give a damn about music today, about the concerns of tastes having changed and Slayer not.” As the rock scene dances weakly from genre to genre like a maimed drunken dog, Slayer remains the rock steady backbone of heaviness, content to wait out the changes and remain faithful to their own noise, the noise that changed forever the landscape of heavy modern rock. “We believe in ourselves,” says Hanneman. “We don’t feel the need to change because everything and everyone else is. Of course, I won’t name names.”

One man they do name is Rick Rubin, the Slayer buddy who moved from a casually appointed executive producer on past projects to the band’s full-fledged man-in-the-studio on Diabolus in Musica. “He knows where we come from and what he wants the record to sound like,” says King. “He’s got weight behind his opinion, but he knows when to leave us alone, too.”

“When he’s mixing the record it’s a big weight off our shoulders,” says Hanneman. “We know what we want to sound like, but sometimes it’s hard for us to get there or even explain it.” Rubin’s right on with his hands-off but I’m-here-for-you approach, ultimately allowing the band to trust its own impeccable instincts. “Given what the band’s achieved without radio,” adds Bostaph, “the fact that Slayer has put out gold records consistently is just a statement of its integrity and its instincts with zero compro mise.”

For Araya, every note on Diabolus in Musica holds true to that credo. “Even after all this time together, this shit still matters to us. It’s our livelihood. We want the band to stay crucial.” With the book on Slayer far from closed, their wish is our command.