Every metalhead has a favorite Slayer album. Mine just so happens to be Undisputed Attitude, the band’s 1996 tribute to their undeniable hardcore influences. Featuring resurrected material from Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo’s Pap Smear project alongside covers of songs from artists like D.R.I., Minor Threat, and Verbal Abuse, the release met with considerable controversy and even disdain from longtime fans and critics alike for being such an anomaly in the band’s catalog. Yet nearly fifteen years later, the record sounds like it could have come out yesterday, a testament to the quality of the covers and of the production value. (“Gemini”, the sole Tom Araya/Kerry King original, still feels oddly tacked on and out-of-place.) The prospect of owning it on “180 gram audiophile vinyl” as part of the now-available boxset The Vinyl Conflict – collecting all of their American Recordings studio LPs and Live Decade Of Aggression–seems too delicious to pass up, even at the roughly $150 price point.

Hop in the Slayer Wayback Machine, watch the simple yet effective video for “I Hate You” (originally by Verbal Abuse) above and weigh in on the record below. How do you feel about Undisputed Attitude? An underrated gem in the catalog? A failed experiment that never should have been?

-GS

So unless you live under a rock in a cave beneath the ocean, you’re aware that the Big Four did some shows together this past June; at the time, I suggested that it would be cool if they all came out and jammed together, and then they did all come out and jam together (video above courtesy Metal Injection), and it wasn’t really that cool. ‘Cause when I made that suggestion, I guess I forgot that this was all the Big Four bands now, not the Big Four bands in 1990.

So I was actually a little relieved — although not at all surprised — that 75% of Slayer did not participate in the jam (the exception being Dave Lombardo, natch). ‘Cause Slayer have always been and will always be “Cooler Than Thou.”

As it turns out, though, Kerry King would have liked to have participated, but had to do the work his lazy and decrepit band mates wouldn’t do. From a recent Revolver interview:

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I hate Disturbed’s music, but the fact that he’s a hypocrite who lacks any real talent aside, David Draiman strikes me as a very intelligent guy. A reader, calling himself simply “Matt,” sent this to me awhile back, and now that Lemmy has re-raised the issue, I think it’s worth discussing even if I don’t really have a solid “answer” per se.

So. This is a Blabbermouth excerpt from a recent Revolver magazine interview with Draiman. I’m going to run the entire excerpt after the jump, and then I’m going to share my thoughts.

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If Horatio Alger were alive today, he’d be tempted to write about Slayer. Defying logic, popular fads and the moral majority, the band is an American thrash-to-riches story, having not just survived, but thrived on a regimen of non-compromise. Future musicologists will no doubt struggle to explain how four guys from Huntington Park forced Reign in Blood down the world’s collective throat, then went on to sell millions of records, win two Grammys, and amass a huge, rabid fanbase. And does any other band have a holiday dedicated to them?

As the curtain closes on their third decade in the music business, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo was good enough to shoot the proverbial shit with MetalSucks when the American Carnage Tour stopped in St. Paul, MN. Read the full transcript of our chat after the jump.

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So I feel like we’ve been talking about this Slayer/Megadeth tour FOR-EV-ER, and last night I finally got to see it. And despite my usual cynical instincts telling me that it might very well end up being a major disappointment, I gotta say… I had a really, really fun time.

Testament were great. That’s not really a surprise or anything — Testament have been great, Testament will be great, and if all else failed, I never really doubted for a second that they’d put on a killer show. If I don’t have much else to say about them, it’s because there was never really any suspense with regards to whether or not they’d be good. (But be advised: they went on shortly before 7 pm, so get to the venue early to make sure you don’t miss ‘em. There were far too many people not yet at the venue when they played, which was a damn shame.)

Megadeth… well, there’s really only one problem with Megadeth: Mustaine’s voice sucks. Like, at a James Hetfield level of suckitude — actually, he might sound worse than Hetfield, who can at least stay on-key or close-enough for 60% of the time. (Mustaine was almost on-key during an encore of “A Tout Le Monde,” and that was about it.) I seriously had to tune out Mustaine’s voice just to enjoy the music. He can still play guitar like nobody’s business, it’s great to have Ellefson back, and if we’re not gonna have Marty Friedman and Nick Menza in the band, than Shawn Drover and Chris Broderick are about as good as it’s gonna get, replacement-wise. But Mustaine’s vocals… it’s just embarrassing, man.

And then there was Slayer.

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Hey Suckfaces, the Big Four live in Sofia, Bulgaria concert/movie thingy has encore showings tomorrow in select markets and you should totally go! It’s the most fun ever. Even if you’re lukewarm on a band/the bands, the theater-going experience is novel and pretty easy to like. It’s communal (like a concert) and comfortable (good for old people who listen to the Big Four). Plus, the little things: set breaks are excised; the audio is that Live Aid quality which disguises not even the smallest flub or shortcut, almost sickeningly real; close-ups of guitar shredding abound; and mosh pits are way more fun in a movie theater.

But if you just can’t make it to this exciting cinema-concert event cuz you’re in jail still from the Lakers celebration parade or you’re a piteously ugly John Bush fan or whatever, here’s what you’ll miss:

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Tonight is the first of the European Big Four shows, and sixteen of the seventeen musicians that now comprise those bands all gathered in one room and put their differences aside long enough to snap this picture (click on it to make it enlarge… heh heh, he said “enlarge”):

Should we over-analyze the reasons why certain people are standing near one another, or far apart, or how they’re standing? Well, this is MetalSucks, ain’t it?

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At least half of the bands playing metal today owe huge debts to D.R.I. — also known as Dirty Rotten Imbeciles — even if the band was an indirect influence. Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman was an early fan, and Kerry King had written off punk as just some noisy bullshit before he discovered the group. Prior to the Massive Aggressive LP, Municipal Waste records were essentially D.R.I. albums. If you dig the Waste and don’t know D.R.I., shame on you. Proceed directly to iTunes or eMusic to catch up on the catalog. It’s a hardcore history lesson.

For a metal audience, D.R.I.’s Crossover is a good place to start. Beer City Records will release an expanded, remastered Millennium Edition of the album on April 13. (It’s already available on iTunes.) A lot of people with credible taste consider it the band’s signature record. I won’t say it’s their worst, but it’s definitely my least favorite — and trust me, I like D.R.I. more than the next guy. They’re gods and should be treated as such. The bonus material makes the reissue a must-have, even if you think the proper LP blows dog.

Crossover is D.R.I.’s Black Album. It was the band’s breakthrough release. But all D.R.I.’s signature elements were M.I.A. Song lengths changed drastically. Rumbling, raw production was replaced with a big-rock sound. Frontman Kurt Brecht’s lyrics were on a downswing. D.R.I. had a new direction. Some fans love the record. Some fans hate it.

One of the Millennium Edition’s eleven bonus tracks is a wicked live version of “Five Year Plan” that starts with an intro which identifies the group as “one of the hardest metalcore bands ever to come out of the Bay Area.” Now that’s old, old footage, and “metalcore” meant something very different then. Everybody was still figuring it out, and if you wanted to know where heavy music was going, D.R.I. was one of the bands to watch.

“Five Year Plan” live video

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The metal community has been using the phrase “It’s their best album since…” a lot as of late. As though spurred on by the nineteen year old kids who now play the music they created better than they do, the Elder Statesmen of Thrash – or EST – have been enjoying a renaissance.

But here’s what sets Slayer apart from the pack: while you could certainly say that “World Painted Blood is Slayer’s best album since Season in the Abyss” and be telling truth, you could have said “It’s their best album since Seasons in the Abyss” about any album since Diabolus in Musica and been telling the truth. Slayer didn’t only just recently get awesome again – they really never stopped being awesome, despite what the scene snobs might have you believe.

But World Painted Blood finds Slayer sounding even more like the band that created the Holy Trinity than Christ Illusion did, so people are even more excited about than they were about that last offering. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

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I’d love it if some kind of behind-the-scenes DVD came with Slayer’s forthcoming World Painted Blood, but I guess I’ll have to settle for this.

The legendary thrashers’ attempt to get people to buy physical copies of their album – in case the four album covers wasn’t enough – is going to be a twenty minute DVD entitled Playing with Dolls, “a 12-episode video-graphic novel” from Metalocalypse director Mark Brooks. Inspired by the Jeff Hanneman-penned track of the same name, a press release tells us that “the film blends elements of animation and still-photography into a visual style similar to that of a graphic novel.”

Based on that description and the below trailer, that makes me think this is going to be akin to that lame Watchmen “motion comic” that came out earlier this year, which is to say, I have very little interest in watching this, huge Slayer fan though I may be. Luckily all signs point to the actual record being awesome, so I don’t feel too concerned about some bonus DVD.

World Painted Blood comes out November 3.

-AR

Let’s cut right to the quick: there’s a new Slayer song, the snappily titled “Hate Worldwide,” which you can listen to here. My first impression of the track, which was written by Kerry King, is that it’s an awfully good Slayer song, although not as good as “Psychopathy Red,” which blew the fucking flesh off of my face the very first time I heard it. Still, that’s an evil fucking riff in this new track, so it even if I think its the inferior of the two, it doesn’t exactly take the wind out of my sails in terms of my high, high hopes for the new Slayer album, World Painted Blood.

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Is “Psychopathy Red” the best Slayer song of the post-Seasons in the Abyss era? I s’pose that’s open to Jaeger-fueled debate – I’m still kinda partial to “Disciple” myself – but any way you cut it, it certainly does rule, and serves, to my mind at least, as example number 8 gazillion why Slayer are so vastly superior to so many of their peers.

So. Saturday, April 18 is Record Store Day, which, in case you don’t know, is pretty much what it sounds like – a day meant to “celebrate” (a.k.a. “get shoppers into”) record stores, or, more specifically, independent record stores. Slayer’s contribution to the day: a limited to 5,000 pressings only 7-inch vinyl of “Psychopathy Red.” A press release gives more details:

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If you’re not familiar with Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series, you should be. Each entry is written by a different music critic and/or journalist, and each one is devoted to the study of a single, seminal album. There’s a wide range of types of music covered by the series – everything from the Beastie Boys to The Velvet Underground – but metal hass, up ’til now, been criminally unrepresented. There are entries for albums by Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, but those aren’t metal bands in the strictest sense and, obviously, both groups have been wholly accepted by the mainstream; there was a book covering Sabbath’s Master of Reality recently, but, weird though it may be, at this point Sabbath are pretty much as accepted and unrebellious a metal band as we’re likely to get.

So D.X. Ferris’ recently release tome on Slayer’s Reign in Blood is the series’ first honest to God (or honest to Satan?) book covering a metal album. And it’s an AWESOME read – fascinating, intelligent, informative and insightful, you’re likely to blow through it record time, and then feel depressed as you realize you’ve reached the last page. Ferris not only takes a critical look at the album, making astute observations and pointing out little musical nooks and crannies you might have never noticed even after your gazillionth spin of the classic record, but he also managed to interview everyone and anyone who was involved with the album – from the band members themselves to producer Rick Rubin to engineer Andy Wallace to cover artist Larry Carroll and a few hundred other people I’m forgetting about – as well as loads and loads of musicians and artists who are fans of the album (Henry Rollins, Tori Amos, Gary Holt, and Paul Romano among them).

After I wrote this blog about Slayer and their continuing relevance in the metal world back in June, Ferris actually e-mailed me basically just to say “thanks” for the shout-out to his book. I asked him if I could shoot him some interview questions, and luckily for us, he agreed. After the jump, read what Ferris had to say about the process of putting the book together, things he learned about both Slayer and Reign in Blood while working on the book, and the state of Slayer today.

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