Three 65, Day 17
Slayer, Reign In Blood

What more can I write about this, the heaviest and fastest of all metal albums? Reign In Blood was the first album Slayer worked on with producer Rick Rubin, and the change in their sound is evident from the moment the album starts: Instead of a doom-inspired slow heaviness, the riffs and drumming come at you with lightning-like speed, like a wall of blades flying into your face at Mach 10.

The whole record is like that. It's almost like a Tom & Jerry cartoon, actually: Everything happens at the speed of light, people die in horrible ways, mutilation and carnage reign supreme. I always have to emphasize this fact when people talk about Slayer in disgusted tones, like: "Ugh, Slayer, those guys are Nazis." Or, "Ugh, Slayer, those guys are into Satan." Yeah, they open the album with a song about Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who experimented on Jews during the Holocaust. Yeah, they frequently invoke the name of Satan and perform with an inverted cross rotating above the drummer.

Folks, it's all spectacle. There's nothing in the classic "Angel Of Death" that specifically endorses Josef Mengele, and the only reason the band flirts with Nazi propaganda is because it sells records and aggravates controversy. And as far as Satanism is concerned, the band had mostly abandoned that stance by the time of Reign In Blood, favoring concepts like death, disease, insanity, and religion - more "street-level" fare.

Keeping with the theme of cartoon as album, the record clocks in at a scant 30 minutes. When Rubin informed the band of this fact, their blank expressions were the only answer he needed. All of the songs run into another, creating a masterpiece of blended thrash that doesn't let up during its entire run - until the final song, "Raining Blood," which, when performed live, featured fake blood drizzling down on the band. Spectacle? It's all part of the show, folks.

Slayer have a lot of great albums. They slowed down their sound for South Of Heaven, varied it up with Seasons In The Abyss, and produced a near-classic in the recent Christ Illusion. But Reign In Blood isn't just Slayer's masterpiece; it's the finest heavy metal album of all time.