Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [121]
It wasn’t just Megadeth that now felt comfortable having a pop at Metallica in the music press. Kerry King of Slayer taunted Kerrang!, calling it ‘the Metallica mag’, before adding pointedly, ‘Too many bands have started to sound commercial who started out heavy,’ specifically citing ‘Mercyful Fate [and] Metallica’. Slayer offered the most powerful rejoinder to Metallica’s stated intention of moving ‘beyond’ thrash, and the most profound confirmation of the genre’s strength when just six months after Master was released their own Reign in Blood arrived in a blaze of glory. Mirroring Master of Puppets in that it was the band’s third album yet first release for a major US label – Def Jam, distributed through Geffen – Reign was viewed as its evil twin; an album that was everything, in fact, that Master was not: devoutly uncommercial, unswervingly confrontational, bringing new meaning to the idea of extreme heavy metal. Produced by Rick Rubin, whose die-hard rock and metal roots had only been hinted at in previous successful signings such as Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys – and who, tellingly, would do so much to restore Metallica’s musical reputation more than a quarter of a century later – Reign shoved Slayer to the forefront of the thrash metal scene, ousting Metallica along the way. Indeed, Rubin went out of his way in the studio to encourage Slayer to make their already ultra-heavy sound even more aggressive and elemental. The other crucial difference was the emphasis on speed, resulting in the album’s ten tracks, each a classic in its own right, being deliciously contorted into just twenty-eight minutes. Even on tracks such as ‘Criminally Insane’ – released as a red-vinyl seven-inch single in the UK, in a twelve-inch cardboard German cross sleeve, replete with chain for hanging round the neck – where the actual rhythm is funereal, the drums and guitars are machine-gun fast. The album’s most infamous track, though, was its opener, ‘Angel of Death’, which listed in excruciating detail the atrocities of Nazi death-camp spectre Dr Josef Mengele, resulting in Slayer being pilloried as Nazi sympathisers, although Mengele’s sickening practices are clearly meant to appal, not inspire. Ultimately, the impact of the album came from the elephantine power and needlepoint precision of moments like the demi-title track, ‘Raining Blood’. As metal musicologist Joel McIver comments: ‘Reign in Blood is where the entire extreme metal pantheon starts and finishes.’
Lars Ulrich agreed, commending Slayer for being ‘the most extreme’ of Metallica’s nearest contemporaries, going on to describe Reign in Blood as ‘one of the best albums of ’86’. He would insist on playing it for the last few minutes before Metallica went onstage: ‘It really gives me a kick [and] makes me want to go out there and beat the hell out of the drum kit.’ The only question, he said, was how much further Slayer would be able to take their music. ‘I think they’re maybe the most interesting because they’re so extreme,’ he conceded. ‘They don’t give a fuck about anything, which is cool. Maybe they don’t wanna take it any further.’
The only other ‘Big Four’ thrash act more intent even than Metallica on breaking out of the mould were old pals Anthrax. While their 1985 album Spreading the Disease stuck close to the thrash template as established by Metallica, who they clearly idolised, it already exhibited signs of the band developing their own identity, from the surprisingly clean guitar sound – destined to become almost as copied as Metallica’s relentlessly thrusting downstrokes – to their songwriting – such as ‘Gung Ho’, an almost camp take on macho soldiering, replete with martial effects – and skateboard-inspired