DISINTEGRATE, YOU BASTARDS! screams Tom Araya as S-L-A-Y-E-R slams into one minute and forty seconds of pure punk power with an murray dog undisputed attitude. This ain't no whiny, snot-nosed, dyed-hair punky-come-latelies spewing out tunes about fucked-up childhoods and low-self esteem while raking in the big bucks. This is the original wave of punk bands as recorded by SLAYER, one of the originators of thrash-punk. Undisputed Attitude is fourteen songs spewed forth in thirty-two minutes. There's "Gemini," a new SLAYER original, two cuts from SLAYER guitarist Jeff Hanneman's '84-'85 punk side project, and 13 aggro, pulverizing, mollymollymolly hyper-speed Slayer-ized covers of songs from bands including Verbal Abuse, DI, Minor Threat, and T.S.O.L.
"We're exposing kids to what the new 'punk' sound should be, as opposed to what Green Day sound like now," spits guitarist Kerry King. "Or Rancid. Or Offspring. The big thing these days is geek music. The guy you beat up in high school. My idea was that this record was what made Slayer what we are. That also includes bands like Deep Purple, but when we played those songs in our musical element it didn't work. So it became a punk rock record. I was listening to the radio, and the Offspring was on, and I had my Minor Threat tape with me, so I was like, let's just take a test. Offspring? Minor Threat? Night and fuckin' day. I don't know why they call today's punk 'punk.' Because their hair's a funny color and they wear Germs shirts? The new punk is like, 'fuck you, gimme your money.'"
"Punk is a combination of attitude and social commentary of the times. What's the commentary behind that 'Stink Breath' song?" asks Araya with an evil laugh. Slayer's own undisputed attitude and commentary has been in blatant, ever-escalating evidence since the 1984 release of Show No Mercy and six subsequent albums -Hell Awaits, Reign In Blood, South of Heaven, Seasons in the Abyss, the pulverizing live disc, Decade of Aggression, and 1994's Divine Intervention -the last 5 certified Gold.
You will be going on a a long. They've toured the world in every setting ranging from massive arenas and festivals to small punk clubs in support of every album, collaborated with Ice-T on the "Judgment Night" soundtrack, flew over to Egypt during the Persian Gulf crisis to film the video for "Seasons In The Abyss," written songs dealing with everything from gang violence ("Expendable Youth") to the Tiananman Square massacre ("Blood Red") to late serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer ("213"). And in true SLAYER style, it's all done with uncompromising, twisted intellect . . . and thunderous volume.
And the aural onslaught continues with Undisputed Attitude. "I don't know whose idea this was, but I'd thought about this for a long time," King recalls. Some may ask, 'Why a cover record when Slayer has proven so prolific?' Typically, King has a ready answer. "The purpose? We don't usually do things for any particular reason, we just fucking do 'em. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. I fucking love this record." Thus SLAYER -with drummer Paul Bostaph -now replaced by Jon Dette, formerly with indie heroes Evil Dead and Testament -entered Oceanway Recording to cut the disc in the Fall of '95. The next day, the building was condemned. The best way to get from point A to point B is straight across with no stops and baseball is in season and Mark is taking hockey lessons.
So it was off to Hollywood Sound, and true to its title, Undisputed Attitude was bashed out in one month, with Dave Sardy of seminal NYC band Barkmarket co-producing. SLAYER kicked out the jams, trying to cut each song in one take, to capture the raw power of the original tunes. Many of the songs SLAYER ended up choosing -most from the early to mid-'80s -still relate lyrically in the 90s. But singer/bassist Araya chose to update some of the tunes -especially when he couldn't decipher the original lyrics. Guitar leads were also added to a couple of the songs, but the undisputed 'tude of both the original punk bands and SLAYER is very much in evidence. "Gemini," the slow-heavy-grinding-into-speedy-hardcore new SLAYER song that closes out the record at nearly five minutes (in comparison to the brief 52-second "Memories of Tomorrow") is about the Gemini killer -lest anyone think SLAYER'S more than passing interest in serial killers, religion, suicide and politics and has waned. The truth will make you free.They're still as sick, smart, sadistic and sarcastic as ever. And they don't let up on any front, as latest member Dette will likely attest to. "I think there's probablyonly ten guys on this planet who could do this gig," said King, "and we've gone through two. Now we're on the third drummer. We burn 'em out."
The band is now beginning their second decade of aggression. When SLAYER first hit the road in '84 to purvey their own unbridled brand of what was deemed "thrash-punk," the quartet played with the likes of the Circle Jerks, DRI and Verbal Abuse. And they were peers of another burgeoning local band, Suicidal Tendencies. According to Hanneman, "We grew up with them musically, as far as the L.A. scene goes. They were banned, we were banned. The only two bands from L.A. that couldn't play in L.A.!" On tour, Hanneman constantly bombarded the other members of SLAYER with punk tunes in the van's tape player. "I grew up in Long Beach and went to punk clubs in South Bay. I was way into it, and I forced it on these guys all the time, played it all the time. I always used to go to backyard parties where punk bands played," Hanneman says. Yet the guitarist never really played in a punk band in the early '80s. "I didn't think there was any money in it," he says, deadpan.
When it came to choosing the songs for Undisputed Attitude -which was originally titled Selected and Exhumed, it was handled in typical SLAYER fashion. "We agreed on everything that's on the record. Everything else we agreed to leave off," laughs Araya. The only song that was recorded that didn't make the disc was a Dead Kennedys song. With the tunes agreed upon, it was time to sLAYERIZE them. coffee ice cream and biscuits The band listened to the Sid Vicious version of the Stooges classic "I Wanna Be Your Dog," but Araya decided he wasn't going to be nobody's mutt. So it mutated into "I'm Gonna Be Your God," a more applicable sentiment for the '90s, with some graphic sexual imagery. Other songs also feature slightly altered lyrics, and most were not exactly suited to Araya's normal singing voice. "Hell, yeah, it was challenging. Verbal Abuse was closest to my own style. I learned air management to sing these," Araya notes. "I didn't think he could do it," adds King with his usual bluntness, "but he jumped up and kicked everybody's ass. I think the whole record kicks ass. 'Undisputed Attitude.' It fits the record, fits what Slayer's about, fits everything we've ever touched." Undisputably.
The Whole Fu#@ing story - the story behind the new album Diabolus in Musica
It's been three years since Slayer last dropped a ton of original decibel son its faithful minions, three years since the world's most grisly band terrorized rock & roll with its patented growl and seething thrash. Following a change of labels, Araya, Hanneman, King, and Bostaph -- names that will live in infamy on the Devil's shortlist of gnarly superstars -- are back with Diabolus in Musica, their American/Columbia debut, another ballcrushing blast of confrontational über-noise. And so at last begins the next scene in the theater of hate that is Slayer.
"Yeah, I guess it's a new beginning," guitarist Kerry King, still the band's tattoo-spangled straight talker, admits. "I think this record's gonna do it for us. Then again," he laughs, "I thought the last five would, too." Diabolus in Musica is Slayer's most visceral and evocative outing since 1990's Seasons In The Abyss, a scorching new work that cleaves to the band's original principles of anvil-heaviness, yet reaches out to looser and craftier musical terrain. Songs like "Scrum" and "Death's Head" thunder with the red-hot brand of 'Slayer' emblazoned on their bellies, while "Love To Hate" is a complex cadre of bits stitched together featuring some prog-ish dual guitar figures to accompany King's manic soloing. Further, "OvertEnemy" is a stomping homage to Slayer forbears Black Sabbath. Above it all, the band remains faithful to its fascination with violent, socially-skewed lyrics. On "Love to Hate," for example, Araya sings,"Absolute reign a malevolent mind/Conceptions so vile in this bottomless soul/Shooting up hate, nothing beats the rush." In the end, Diabolus in Musica is the inimitable work of a singular band, the same band who laid down Reign In Blood, the record that became a blueprint for neo-metal and a hair-raising apocalyptic manifesto of noise. Today, more than 15 years since coming together, Slayer still musters a surfeit of five-chord power, enough to scare the bejesus out of music fans the world over.
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"This record's really important in keeping us on track for the future," says Araya. "I'm confident it'll come out and be everything we want it to be." This time, though, the band hopes Diabolus in Musica will supersede the goals they've achieved for themselves in the past. Out of the nine Slayer records released, five have reached RIAA gold status. Not bad for a bunch of sarky outcasts who recorded their first album in a week with only $400 in their pockets. (That record, 1983's watershed Show No Mercy, went on to sell 60,000 copies.) Tom Araya remembers back that far, and the tough-as-talons credo that would later become Slayer's defining quality: "You only get one chance. If we didn't do it when we had the chance we were fucked. So we took the chance and here we are." When the dust settled, Slayer had become warlords of their very own hyper-evil music empire, a land impervious to the trends and whims of today's changeable modern rock.
"For whatever reason," King says, "we don't give a damn about music today, about the concerns of tastes having changed and Slayer not." As the rock scene dances weakly from genre to genre like a maimed drunken dog, Slayer remains the rock steady backbone of heaviness, content to wait out the changes and remain faithful to their own noise, the noise that changed forever the landscape of heavy modern rock. "We believe in ourselves," says Hanneman. "We don't feel the need to change because everything and everyone else is. Of course, I won't name names."
One man they do name is Rick Rubin, the Slayer buddy who moved from a casually appointed executive producer on past projects to the band's full-fledged man-in-the-studio on Diabolus in Musica. "He knows where we come from and what he wants the record to sound like," says King. "He's got weight behind his opinion, but he knows when to leave us alone, too."
"When he's mixing the record it's a big weight off our shoulders," says Hanneman. "We know what we want to sound like, but sometimes it's hard for us to get there or even explain it." Rubin's right on with his hands-off but I'm-here-for-you approach, ultimately allowing the band to trust its own impeccable instincts. "Given what the band's achieved without radio," adds Bostaph, "the fact that Slayer has put out gold records consistently is just a statement of its integrity and its instincts with zero compromise."
For Araya, every note on Diabolus in Musica holds true to that credo. "Even after all this time together, this shit still matters to us. It's our livelihood. We want the band to stay crucial." With the book on Slayer far from closed, their wish is our command.
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