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The musical ancestors of death metal, Slayer took punk speed and simplicity and merged it with the evolving structural language of speed metal and produced angry, evil, subversive tunes which worked against the normative impulse of the society around them.

Haunting the Chapel
Production: Practice room muted and distorted production produces nonetheless a nice atmosphere, despite lack of clarity on guitar and ill-distinguished bass and drums.

Review: The classic opening shot for death metal, Slayer's "Haunting the Chapel," revels in Slayer's upcoming power when as a young metal band they fused primitive styles and the more flamboyant excesses of heavy metal to create primal extremity with their simple but orchestrated, artistically-significant, and socially relevant music.

The EP opens with "Chemical Warfare," a classic three-chord song paced with emotion and violence in a story of human helplessness in the face of alien manipulation and, eventually, chemical genocide. In a citation of older Black Sabbath lyrics, Slayer have Satan laughing consume the victims of this toxic holocaust, putting a mythological or perhaps even gnostic significance on top of petty human combat.

After that "Captor of Sin," an archetypal early Slayer song, trudges and bashes through its paces, followed by "Haunting the Chapel," a dark epic masterpiece of gloom. Through all of these songs insurgent energy, rebellious intellect, and miscreant uprising permeate as a method of living.

Finally, Slayer cap off the remastered version of this EP with "Aggressive Perfector," a Judas Priest style composition from the early eighties. Moving more slowly than their stirring live performances of this work, the recording here is probably not worth the time but the rest of the EP is excellent, high-class work which reveals the developing intellect of a groundbreaking metal band.
 

Show No Mercy
Production: Reasonable studio production that covers guitars and leaves a spectral but surgical drum presence in the background, nicely arching a slightly echoed voice into the mix without overamplifying the scream. Note for Remasters: Sound is actually clearer than original, at the price of digital lossiness on drums and tone. Buy the originals used.

Review: Slayer originate the styles of death metal in this groundbreaking fusion of epic heavy metal with hardcore punk and nihilistic thrash bands. Tom Araya's deathbreaking scream adds color to the driving guitar rhythm hurled forward on precision chasing beats which drive with violence through a sequence of linear structures to support the protean riff structure, like most of death metal to follow holding together through the interlocked repetition of simple abstract structures.

In the conception of larger works Slayer found the complexity necessary to adapt the alienated musical elements of power chords and noise-laden speed solos into moveable pieces which fit into each codex of song, revealed here in the nascent state of artistic conceptual development and thus limited to sometimes more random pairing of component riff structures. Despite this, through ingenuity and variation Slayer build and impressive and evocative album of classic metal ideas interpreted in the freshness of conception, an artist's creative but not technical prime.

Riff architecture in rock n roll attained a new prerequisite of complexity with this release, where Slayer bond the granularity of Discharge or D.R.I. with the longer-phrased complex riffing of Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. Abstracting basic relationships of music to states of intense tension in opposition, Slayer surgically manipulate note position and strumming rhythm, creating simultaneously a style of phrase building and a technique for embedding ambient rhythm: high-speed strumming of notes or basic power chords to shape columnar structures of sustained harmonic intensity, like a tremelo in the liquid overwash spaciotemporal haze of LSD.

What amazes most about Slayer is the inherent coherence of its structure and complexity, the state of being so...naturally divergent and replicative, continuative without being contrived. Underneath the lyrics of violent death and evil subversion, the occasional rockstar vocalizations, and the relentless throb of drumming is the living warmth of an intellect asserting the power of life rather than relapsing into justification or denial. In that this music is truly "Satanic," if that word must ever be used for something so seemingly in jest, but perhaps only in the sense that for a moment artist and listener escaped their dutybound heads for a conference with the universe.

Lyrics and lead guitar alone are subjects worthy of study; in the text, Araya and lyricmates Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman issue almost metered, variable, evocative poems covering sinister conspiracies behind the roaring mutant death of a modern world. Their issue is clearly mortality and behind it, the chaotic and destructive nature of our world; as if a mirror, their lead guitar solos are broken and twisted streams of notes ellided by distortion and melodic through the resonating breakdown of microtones in each note.

Despite being often irrelevant to conventional patterns of tonal arrangement and composition, these solos have reconstructed music to speak a personalized language, one that not only works within this music but suggests a new method of interpreting music as a whole. Like the words rhythmically correspondent to a riff, or like the endless sequence of power chord riffing that reiterates a rhythm and simple vector of theme, the solos are nihilistic structures fitting into a conception distanced from anything but nihilism as a method of achieving a freedom for a chaotic, resonant, living system of metaphor to emerge unfettered into evocative fantasy.
 

Hell Awaits
Production: Representative of the production values of the time the soundstyling here captures the essence of guitars, drums, bass and then kicks the voice out over the top, this time with too much of a chilly overtone of echo.

Review: Fast and terrifying violent music fused from the alienated self-contrast of thrash and the accelerating rhythms of extreme speed and black metal, Slayer came hybrized but full of voice. From the clean-sung but entrenched, riot-shouted vocals of Tom Araya to the pugilistic network of respondent drumbeats upholding a harangue of ambient fast-strummed riffs and nervous, erratic, chaotic metaspoken lead guitar.

Noise-based as much of the guitar pyrocuneiform is, the power of Slayer's composition is to amplify a simple virus through breakdown into multiple variations of a core rhythm in architectural riffs built from fragmented scales and basic harmonic ideas to emphasize basic mathematical concepts behind the doomscience of lyrics and budding death metal aesthetic. Even the faster speed songs and the savage self-combative moments of thrash carry a complexity borrowed from the progressive rock gods of the previous generation and the metal masters who bestowed their creations with the complex metaphorical language of imagination.

Rhythmic emphasis comes entirely through guitars, which lead drums because the linear complexity tracking of the song moves fluidly through the variations of riffing which move, ambient, through patterns over the percussive components of the song, allowing drums to maintain greater simplicity and to unleash guitars to freedom of voicing over predictable rhythm upholding self-defined major components of each song. Slayer's composition is often called chromatic, meaning that it uses linear scales, but more appropriately it is nihilistic: a note or chord becomes the basis for invention of new recombinant pieces of information, creating a self-specialized evolutionary compositional space for the conception of each song.

Nihilism pervades also the virulent lyrics and the haphazard, almost careless method with which guitarists K. King and J. Hanneman drop into a solo and work it through some motions of noise. The core of this comes within the text of Slayer's obssession with the seat of control of violence and death, as well as from the alienated methodology of their major ancestors in hardcore and thrash. However nihilism is not their excuse, only their origin; without pretense they wrest beauty from the essential deconstruction of music, and from that beauty they create romantic epics of despair and oblivion that influenced all metal, and much of popular music, to follow.
 

Divine Intervention
Production: Very competent, clear and representative although perhaps too much bass and drums and not enough guitar tone, as that's one of the vital components of a metal band.

Review: My first thoughts when i heard this one: what a mess. A complete lack of metaconcepts, a complete lack of vision, a complete lack of artistic impetus. A lot of things pull this album in different directions: Pantera's success, Metallica's success, a desire to avoid Seasons the second, and a lust to fulfill the need for what they see as the issue, which is the public wanting another Reign in Blood -- a need they interpret to be a yearning for "simple, fast" as opposed to the magnificent structure and
potency of sublime rage that was that foundational album.

The first thing you notice is Tom Araya's singing -- his voice strains as if he's overdriving it into a mike turned down low, but his singing is the prominent part of the mix. Under it guitars lurk at three chords, with a lot of emphasis on rhythmic strumming to syncopate with Araya's half-chanted, half-screamed vocals (in which there is a primary rhythmic instrument, leading the song instead of augmenting it). Occasional parts take off, but fall, sloppily, into simpler patterns or simple speed repetition.

It's toned down, although many songs are faster than the more late speed metal South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss. The tight speed metal structuring of Seasons in the Abyss has given way to uninspired, predictable phrasing and more singable, chantable, rememberable songs, illustrating the adage: if you can't write good lyrics, lay down a vocal track they'll remember, so that they may distinguish between songs. Previously, Slayer's architectural riffs had stood out against each other so strikingly as to be impossible not to notice the differences -- here, instead, we have a series of discontiguous riffs making up an album which is roughly tied together by a ranting scream generating some pretty unimpressively bland (and often stupid) lyrics.

I worship this band's earlier work as godly, so my opinion may be a bit harsh, but i'm glad this came as a promo and I didn't have to pay for it, as I would have been seriously disappointed. I think there are elements of commercialism in the vocals and the simplification, but i think mainly there's confusion: an aging band disappointed in its own performance half giving up, half giving in, and a little bit scared.