Slayer - Decade of Aggression: Live

SLAYER RULES!!!

What can you say? Slayer Live rocks so hard it's impossible to speak. Just crank up the volume and start headbanging!!! October 10, 2008

"The root of all evil is the heart of a black soul"

My second pick for my favorite Halloween albums goes to the most evil band walking this earth. All who came after are pretenders walking their footsteps. these guys were and are true originals. I love live albums and since most serious metal bands don't bother with "greatest hits" packages this is the best album to get to hear the greatest songs of the original Satanic heavy metal band (Sabbath was never actually Satanic).

It's Slayer, it's live, it's Slayer live. Nobody can mistake the sound and experience of this for anything else. There simply is no show like a Slayer concert. The fastest and heaviest of thrash metal's revered "Big Four " (the others are Anthrax, Megadeth, and Ride the Lightning), these guys take no prisoners and actively seek to offend and even terrify all but the hardest core of rock fans. Unsatisfied with typical musical scales, dueling lead guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman created their own and in doing so made their shredding solos so chaotic and unpredictable that they turned off a good deal of metal fans who appreciate the genre largely for the technical proficiency of the musicians. Add some wild squealing Floyd Rose whammy bar action, Dave Lombardo's unrelenting double-bass drum assault, and Tom Araya's incomprehensively fast simultaneous barking vocals and bass guitar and you've got pure sonic anarchy.

Single disc live albums? For wusses. To capture the epic nature of a truly great live performance, you need at least an hour and a half of unrelenting music. "Decade of Aggression" gives you that and more. Most bands put out live albums, but it's a lie. They add extra vocals, guitars, and whatnot to the mix after the fact to cover up their perceived inadequacies. None of that here, though you wouldn't know it without reading the liner notes; this album sounds fantastic.... like Slayer live.

Slayer's lyrics are as pitch black as they come; almost to the point where they come full circle and become silly at times. Not any sillier than the films they often reference, but silly enough that any non-idiot music fan wouldn't take them literally. Anthems of damnation and Armageddon ("Hell Awaits", ) and anti-government rebellion told through grisly tales of war ("War Ensemble", "Mandatory Suicide") are the norm and both real life and supernatural horrors are explored in full. My favorite tracks are "Dead Skin Mask" -about Ed Gein, who inspired the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre-, the epic "Seasons in the Abyss", "South of Heaven", "Blood Red" and, of course, the two unforgettable songs every metal fan knows by heart: "Raining Blood" and "Angel of Death" from their penultimate thrash album Reign in Blood.

Whether mocking Christianity ("Jesus Saves") or depicting the tortures of a Nazi concentration camp (the previously mentioned "Angel of Death"), you are almost guaranteed to be amazed by this band's capacity for darkness. Even the name their fans go by, "Slaytanists", is offensive. All of these things makes Slayer a must-hear band for anybody who can call themselves a metal and/or horror fan. This music is indeed the Soundtrack to the Apocalypse.

And my parade of musical horrors marches on...

October 4, 2008

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