The Big Four of thrash metal all played with the formula. Fact is, each of these bands who helped to shape heavy metal in its relative infancy punted the rulebook out of the window at some point. Metallica added blues elements and ballads on Load and ReLoad, Anthrax helped kickstart nu metal as we know it with “Bring Tha Noize,” and Megadeth were also there. Even Slayer, whose name conjures up an image of a battle-jacketed dudebro who unironically wants pop stars dead, toyed around with their usual antics.
Slayer’s 1998 album Diabolus in Musica was a serious departure from the norm. For one, it was their first LP with Paul Bostaph on drums, as opposed to double-kick destroyer Dave Lombardo. It also saw the band take a more groove-oriented approach, thanks in part to co-guitarist Jeff Hanneman writing most of the album, making an effort to embrace the changing music world around them. They also tuned a full step lower than their usual E-flat tuning, playing the album in D-flat tuning, one and a half steps (or three semitones, for the music theorists) below standard tuning.
Kerry King, his co-axeman, despised it, and was more or less making chicken salad out of chicken shit. To this day, the only song that sees any play live is the lone single “Stain of Mind,” which has an odd syncopated bounce to it while bassist/vocalist Tom Araya almost raps the verses. Granted, he’s not much of a singer to begin with, but hearing Araya do his best shot at nu metal is a listen for sure.
In an effort to get some of their heat back in the new millennium, the band sought out someone more steeped in the metal scene, going with Matt Hyde, a producer and audio engineer whose work to that point had included Cypress Hill, who were never afraid to throw some guitars behind their bars, as well as No Doubt’s smash hit Tragic Kingdom and Monster Magnet’s Powertrip. King also assumed much of the songwriting duties for the record, opting to try to strike a more realistic nerve with listeners. He wanted to get away from “the usual Dungeons & Dragons shit” from previous records. Given that fact that some of their previous work concerned itself with Josef Mengele and Ed Gein, to name but a couple, that’s one fucked-up fantasy land they’re trying to depart from.
While the best intentions were surely laid, God Hates Us All released on September 11th, 2001. With its blasphemous album art boasting nails driven into a bible with the band’s logo scratched into the cover, splattered with blood, and a reeling America rightfully clutching their collective pearls, the band came under fire, though it turns out that the label was to blame. In an interview with Recoil, King lamented:
"[It was] typical of a record company with absolutely no idea what the fuck they were going to do… [it] looked like a seventh grader defaced the Bible."
As such, a slipcover was issued for the album in some retail locations, covering the offending art with a white cover with golden crosses arranged in a cross. Of course, given the day that the album was released and what happened with the attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, Slayer came under fire, and worse still, this wasn’t the first time this happened. “War Ensemble” was previously skewered by pundits, as its corresponding studio album Seasons In The Abyss released around the time of the Gulf War, and was therefore seen to be in poor taste. Of course, the events of 9/11 could not have been foreseen, and the release of God Hates Us All was actually supposed to be on July 10th, 2001, before concerns about the mix and the distribution pushed things back two months.
The original cover and the slipcover. Unpopular opinion... I think the slipcover version is better.
For as much as Slayer has come under fire nowadays by virtue-signaling creators, this instance of egg on the band’s face was purely coincidental, and it would take another four years and change before they really stirred the pot with “Jihad” from their 2006 album Christ Illusion.
Coming back to God Hates Us All, the album starts off hot enough, as the opening interlude “Darkness of Christ” sounds like a sample of classic Slayer, albeit compressed and the volume dial is being turned with all of the speed and urgency of the DMV sloth in Zootopia. When things do crescendo, “Disciple” kicks in, and it makes a statement: this is the Slayer you know and love, just bear with us here. Yes, there’s a bit more chugging, and a breakdown does feel like they’re still trying to stay modern, but in this weird, awkward teenager phase of Slayer’s career, this song feels like a return to form.
“God Send Death” starts with a phaser pedal-assisted guitar lead, which does evoke a bit of nu metal, but for all of that, a solo-off between King and Hanneman reminds folks that guitar solos aren’t dead, dissonance be damned. “New Faith” continues the classic Slayer sounds, particularly with Paul Bostaph’s double-kick triplets, evoking sounds of his predecessor Dave Lombardo, widely regarded as the godfather of double-bass drumming. At this point, the feeling is “we know we fucked around on the last album, but we haven’t forgotten who we are, promise,” albeit they do so without trying to sound like a Slayer cover band, rather than Slayer. The rulebook takes a trip out the window with “Cast Down,” which sees the seven-string guitars come out for the first of two times. The verse sounds like something from the previous record, as if it were a reworked portion of something intended for “Stain of Mind.” Layers of vocals also feel a bit out of place for Slayer, but at least a wah-soaked solo jolts us back to reality.
Then comes “Threshold,” the most nu-sounding track on the record by a walk. You’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t a Slayer song, as even with Tom Araya’s very recognizable voice, it doesn’t feel like Slayer, even though his usual yell is a quasi-rap. No guitar solo, an ebb and flow, a quiet verse, loud chorus structure which dominated the Nineties alternative scene - you know, the thing that Slayer was fighting the incoming tide of - and yet it works. It is an oddity in the band’s extensive catalog, though the last time it was played live was in 2013, and with the band in full “this is the last time, we promise, oh by the way we’re playing a one-off show here and a festival there” mode, it seems unlikely that “Threshold” will see the light of day again.
Like a band testing the waters with a new song to mixed results, things slip back into familiar territory with “Exile,” complete with D-beat drumming and a galloping guitar riff to boot. The following track “Seven Faces” sees a rarity, with Araya attempting clean vocals, and while it’d be disingenuous to call him a bad singer, he’s not exactly known for his crooning, and that’s before you get to the opening howl that is “we have the ‘Angel of Death’ intro at home.” Again, points for trying something new, but it doesn’t quite hit.
What does hit, however, and hits like a truck at that, is “Bloodline,” the most accessible and, dare I say, radio-friendly song on the record, if not in Slayer’s entire catalog. The blood-drenched music video helps keep things dark and weird, though for wanting to get away from the “Dungeons & Dragons shit,” a song about vampires, siphoning blood, and preparing to reign a thousand years is some Curse of Strahd shit if ever there were.
“Deviance” certainly lives up to the name, as it’s just… weird. There’s no other way to put it. Samples of screams and radio chatter serve as the precursor to a slower, moodier backdrop, though the melody of the verse feels off. Granted, Araya’s attempts at clean singing don’t feel right, but the whole mix just feels weird. Perhaps this is an artistic choice, given the song’s subject matter of someone reflecting on how twisted and sick they really are, but even then, it just isn’t pleasant to listen to, which isn’t something one usually says about a metal song.
The final three songs close the affair on the highest of high notes. “Warzone” sounds like a Slipknot song to begin, with its frenetic drumming from Bostaph and urgent pacing throughout. This is Slayer embracing “what the kids like” and doing so justice. It may not sound like classic Slayer, but “Warzone” ends up as a sleeper hit on a sleeper album. “Here Comes The Pain” is the second of two seven-string tracks on the record, and feels like classic Slayer with just a pinch of the nu groove they’ve been exploring. It may be the best distillation of the new nu era of the band without fully losing the plot in either direction, to say nothing about Bostaph drumming like the goddamn rent was due.
The whole quartet plays like such on the closing “Payback,” which is a berserker of a song, thrashing its way to the end without letting up. With a chorus featuring more F-bombs than a playground full of kids who just learned swears from South Park, the song earns the album its Parental Advisory sticker almost single-handedly, if the previous twelve tracks hadn’t already done so. There may not be forty-six fucks in a fucked-up rhyme, but the chorus tries for that:
“Tear your fucking eyes out
Rip your fucking flesh off
Beat you till you're just a fucking lifeless carcass
Fuck you and your progress
Watch me fucking regress
You were made to take the fall, now you're nothing
Payback's a bitch, motherfucker”
While albums like Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss are the most celebrated in Slayer’s catalog, and the hardcore battle-jacketed fans among them will look down their noses at the nu world, they must remember that Slayer dabbled in the game for not one, but two records. Even though the latter of those was flirting with the old Slayer sound, Diabolus in Musica and God Hates Us All ended up as their Load and ReLoad, albeit with different levels of success and reverence. Two of the Big Four of thrash metal explicitly took on nu metal, as Anthrax would help pioneer it with “I’m The Man” and their team-up with Public Enemy, and Metallica would go on to embrace modern sensibilities on their reunion record St. Anger, leaving Megadeth as the only band of the four that didn’t play around in the nu metal sandbox… except they had Ice-T on the song “Night Stalkers” on their penultimate record.
Point is, the hate for nu metal within the metal world falls apart on itself, as even the most “true” among metal bands, those who revolutionized the genre and helped it launch into the mainstream, experimented with it to try to capture the zeitgeist. As such a quarter of a century after Slayer closed the book on their alternative or nu-thrash era, let’s remind ourselves that a little dabbling never hurt anyone, and even your favorites probably did something totally out of left field at one point. Embrace the weird era, as sometimes you find something completely surprising.
