RIYL: Sepultura, Pantera, Suicidal Tendencies
Ready… set… SLAYER!! How these guys still crank ’em out after all these years (their debut album, Show No Mercy, turned 25 last year), we may never know. But the important thing about Slayer’s latest, World Painted Blood, is not just how this record drops the band even more firmly back into classic Slayer territory than 2006’s Christ Illusion, but where in that spectrum we find the band. Whether playing Reign in Blood in its entirety for a number of live concerts with original drummer Dave Lombardo (who is back again on World) had any effect on the proceedings, one has to wonder. For that’s the album World most closely resembles, with the title track’s multi-part construct mirroring the classic “Angel of Death.” It also shares space with shorter, punkier numbers like “Psychopathy Red,” which finds Tom Araya shredding his vocal cords more mercilessly than he ever has before.
Lombardo draws from his ’80s bag of drum tricks, while Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman occasionally reference even their ’90s work with their creepy-sinister guitar riffs, making the case for Slayer as death metal’s own AC/DC – solidly dependable from album to album, sticking to their tried-and-true dark subject matter, and occasionally straying from what made them great, but always sounding like nobody else. (American Recordings 2009)
