International Day of Slayer, riffing on the National Day of Prayer, kicks off on June 6, 2022 with new classic Slayer recordings for you to blast all day long while you skip work, school, and all other meaningless activities in order to listen to Slayer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p90VxoTYJ2s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48s0XsL2iCU
Tags: international day of slayer, National Day of Slayer, slayer, Speed Metal
I think slayer is bad
Signed, jesus christ
Goin’ out to get smokes. Be back soon.
Signed, your dad.
Don’t forget the condoms, daddy
Jesus Christ was the original mixed-race (half-Roman/half-Israelite) kid who went to India, smoked a bunch of weed, brought back Hindu, Greco-Roman, Nordic, and Babylonian ideas and blended them with the neurotic, confused Judaism of his day to make Christianity. It was a historical bungle that played into the hands of grifters, as hippies always do. Seen any Boomers living the non-corporate, free spirited life lately? Me either.
You should write more articles to focus your autism.
I hear the new Pharmacist will cure what ails ya.
Also, where the hell would Jesus get ahold of Nordic ideas?
We know the Nords traded with the region fairly extensively. There are probably also proto-IE precursors.
But isn’t the rule that larger cultures influence smaller ones and not so much the other way around?
I second Pharmacist.
It was a day of new Satan, Pharmacist and of course Classic Slayer.
It’s cool to hear pharmacist trying to be more creative but like their other releases I don’t need to hear it again
Surely there are still some old hippies around on some derelict compound, surviving off of stale tofu and homegrown weed.
if your girlfriend is a vegan does that mean that you have a tofu cock?
i’ḿ asking for a friend
Vegan girlfriend = high maintenance, generally, because most vegans are doing it for social status points. If you find an honest animal rights fanatic, she will probably make an exception for voluntary emissions. They are basically food libertarians at heart, hoping to make a difference through voluntary behavior that 99% of the population will ignore.
> most vegans are doing it for social status points.
When most people are just annoyed with them? Sounds more like righteousness than social whoring.
Iconoclasm, ironism, and contrarianism have strong social pull.
Its most likely both. You know, the whole shtick about how no publicity is bad publicity.
Slayer never mentioned 666 in their lyrics. This day shouldn’t belong to them. It should belong to Iron Maiden.
Slayer mentioned enough cool occult stuff to be worth using as the icon of metal’s occultism. For them, the lyrical topic of Satanism changed over time from a belief that human bad behavior empowered evil (parallel to Black Sabbath “War Pigs”) to an embrace of the occult as a way out of the suffocating egalitarian pacifistic morality that encourages such bad behavior. In my view, they were artists using a powerful metaphor, not propagandists encouraging willful evil.
Iron Maiden’s 666 album blows. Definitely not worth celebrating.
Slayer on the other hand is something most metalheads can agree on.
It was kind of doomed, following Killers. Almost anything was going to come across as lesser.
Not that it really matters, but:
“The pestilence of Jesus Christ
There never was a sacrifice
No man who hung the crucifix
Beware the cult of purity
Infectious imbecility
I’ve made my choice
666!”
However as mentioned earlier their bread and butter was early on when they would shift from dark and abstract topics that worked great with Jeff’s riffs to what amounts to blunt force realism within the same album. I think toward the end they focused too much on the latter while also dabbling in boring nu-metal stuff.
It’s hard to find any fault in that first decade of material though.
As far as Iron Maiden goes I think Killers and Powerslave are the only two that stood up over time. Although I have tons of respect for Steve Harris, and the artwork they went with for a lot of those album covers is amazing. Otherwise I think they’ll be remembered more as history buffs who happened to be very good musicians.
The problems with Christianity are too complex to be conveyed by lyrics, and most of the smart Christians have worked their way around them already (I imagine Araya is in this camp too). For example, once you reject dualism, universalism, and the morality of pity (“good to the good” = good to the bad also by implication, versus the pagan “good to the good, bad to the bad”) there is not much of the pre-Jewish post-Assyrian Semitic simplification of the PIE faith into proto-Abrahamism. At that point, though, one wonders why be Christian at all, when something like perennialism — a belief that God is of this world, and all religions say basically the same thing, a degraded form of hermeticism that was the root of PIE faith — is a quicker route. The answer for most is tradition, history, and personal history; if you knew inspiring Christians when you were young, and everyone else around you was babbling civilizational decay rationalization, you will be a Christian for life.
My take on Maiden is that you are not wrong, but that why Killers stands out (at least) is that it deviates from pop/rock/blues songwriting enough to be interesting. Maiden has never shipped a truly bad album in my view, and there are worthwhile songs on all with a little filler, which is why their live shows are sought; they are basically a compilation of all the highlights, played uniformly and often updated and streamlined a bit. But the pop kills it. This opinion was not unique at the time The Number of the Beast came out; the metalheads who were still in love with 70s prog and psych found the new album to be a bit, well, pop. The guitarists loved the leads but pointed out that riffs had taken a backseat to the dominant Bruce vocals. My guess is that it was this group in part who went on to form the riff salad genre of death metal, since regular pop-rock-blues songs sound sort of like, well, advertising. Verse-chorus dominates even if you throw in a few cool deviations and turnarounds like they did on The Number of the Beast.
It was also clear that Maiden knew they could troll the Moral Majority crowd who were just starting their reaction to the fallout of the 1960s, namely a proliferation of serial killers, pedophiles, and urban decay (diversity, drugs, alcohol, vandalism, and gang crime). Graffiti may be art as the hip and hip-hop 1990s kids alleged, but it also is vandalism and when you get enough of it, your city resembles the chaos of decay rather than the chaos of birth. If every individualist scribbles his individualistic message on the city walls, you end up with gibberish, not Ulysses. This is why we have social hierarchy and editors.
In many ways, the editor Iron Maiden got was their live shows, which are where they are spectacular, having started as a gigging band that listened closely to its audience (more closely than the audience listened to some of their tunes). The editor they may need, some day, would be to return to these old songs and write them more on the ambitious framework that Harris tends toward when he is not in “git ‘er done” mode. I think Di’Anno may have been more than a vocalist, like a spiritual cofather of the band, because despite his punk origins, or maybe because of them, he either spurred or provoked Harris and the others into thinking big. Perhaps the problem of Maiden is that of most things: the product succeeded, so thinking stopped there, and then they turned toward trying to find a way to keep what they had, instead of expanding to the next objective; this is the permanent and enduring problem of rule by popularity.
By keeping Di’Anno and ignoring Dickinson (who was always the entrepreneur), Maiden may have avoided the pop of Beast, but I suspect Harris was capable of that all by himself.
I mean, who expected Anthems after Nightside? At the time, I was convinced some fundamental change in personnel had fucked them up for good. But it seems Ihs and Sam had just lost interest and it was all on them. (Unless we want to credit the dungeon troll for their previous success.)
Most bands have three good albums in them. The first one is their raw ideas, with the second they learn to work for the details, and on the third they present their ideas the way they wish they had the first time, but then all that they learned in their first two decades is spent and they have no idea where to take it. At that point, they probably need a five or ten year break to have life experience not related to rock ‘n roll, the industry, or partying… but few get that, unless they have phat trust funds already.
Last week I queued up ‘Reverence’ (in preparation for ‘Anthems’) after getting nostalgic about the first two.
“It couldn’t be that bad,” I thought. “Not right after ‘Nightside’,” I thought. “I definitely have some bias so it’s gotta be better than I remember.”
Anyway, you shouldn’t call Faust a troll just because he murdered a guy.
That experience is always like listening to a loved one die. My condolences.
Had Faust played on Anthems we’d at least have some imaginative drumming to sit through. Trym’s clinical smash-everything-to-pieces attitude was all right on Enslaved’s most ruthless tracks, but otherwise …
I ended up listening mostly to early Emperor because after In the Nightside Eclipse, the band seemed to lose whatever is was that enabled them to make transportive music.
concerning the Killers (and the first) album, the past decade it has become clear that ‘Arry “forgot” to credit some of the older (past) Maiden members with songwriting. For instance, prowler, phantom, strange world,charlotte, ides of march, prodigal son, drifter, have all been “rumored” to have been at least partially written by others than steve. also, some of the Killers songs were already played live in 1978, whereas NOTB was a “totally new” album. so apart from the vocalist change there are also other factors making a difference. and, NOTB has its moments. but also here, uncredited songwriting. for instance, the basic riff for children of the damned was an old Samson song idea that got cut by their producer.(incredible, huh) if you know this, you can pinpoint, in children of the damned, the second as to where ‘Arry decided to chip in with his songwriting abilities (that’s C – D – E or a variation thereof). 22 acacia avenue was an old urchin song idea (Old band of adrian smith). best part of ‘Arry’s nicking abilities is the last 6 or 8 sentences of Hallowed be thy name, originally written by a guy named Barry Quinn, in….1969… the issue got settled in or out of court. so the first 3 albums are a mixture of Harris’s songwriting,the songwriting of older 70s members, loose ideas floating around from samson and urchin plus those iconic last sentences from HBTN – nicked- that ecstatic masses around the world have been singing in south american stadiums for decades.
when they did piece of mind they got into their own, being the Iron Maiden that they still are today. It’s just a different band, altogether, and although they have been successful for decades, and made a lot of cash, after the first 3 records everything is…moot….at best. boring. but I worshiped the first 3.
Harris strikes me as being similar to John McEntee and Euronymous in this sense: he was a manager more than a writer at some times, picking up the good bits and finalizing them when they were not going anywhere in their previous form. Contrast Deathcrush with De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas: it is not just Varg helping out with songwriting that makes it work, but Euronymous marshaling lots of contributions from talented musicians into an end point. Similarly only Onward to Golgotha someone funneled a talented rhythm team that on its own writes semi-atmospheric death metal into a focused agency of its own, using contributions from Profanatica, Immolation, and dozens of NY and east coast bands to make a finished product that was fantastic.
The point is, I suppose, sometimes leadership consists of knowing which ideas to steal and how to make them into their final form. Metallica stole over half of their first two albums, but no one cares because they made something out of it which was both different and better. Every musician borrows or is inspired by something, whether birdsong or folk songs, but it is what they do with it that matters. To them it is less of a big deal, since certain rhythm and scale patterns are natural and therefore, discoveries within them seem more like variations on a theme than grand creations in their own right. It is also worth looking at what Mozart did to a Turkish march and Brahms did with Hungarian dance music, or even Respighi did to older wopwopwopwopItalian folk music and early music with Ancient Airs and Dances.
The management changed with Dickinson however; he took over, in part because he has the greatest amount of commercial skill. He decided that Maiden wanted to be giant, and to do that they needed to make old Maiden into shorter vocal-driven songs. The beauty of Di’Anno was that, coming from punk, he was accustomed to the vocalist being sort of irrelevant noise much of the time, but came in strong for when the vocalist could contribute. This allowed him to let the guitars drive the songs. Starting with The Number of the Beast, Maiden songs went for a three-riff ideal with a catchy vocal. In some ways, they improved musically, but stagnated artistically, and Piece of Time was their attempt to bring back what they had on Killers, the prog-metal fusion, with limited success. I am less fond of the self-titled Iron Maiden, although it has good raw spirit.
I would agree on a number of levels, especially with harris being the manager type and all. And yes, everybody is inspired or nicks an an idea now and then. The “plagiarism” on metallica’s first records is there too. but when you buy a record, at 15, and you love it, you don’t care. apart from that, most of the ideas come from obscure metal, and they were used by true metalheads, 18/19 year olds, Hetfield/Ulrich, ofcourse they hoped making it big but who could have thought.
With iron maiden/harris, there is a band, Iron Maiden, starting in 1976, that ended somewhere in 1978 when Harris fired Dave Murray on insistence of the singer Dennis Wilcock. Harris then changed his mind, fired Wilcock (the singer, the guy who thought up the mask and the blood on stage) and got Murray back. I think this is the most important decision Steve Harris the entrepreneur and HR manager made in the history of the band. At that moment in time there were only two members in Iron Maiden, Harris and Murray. From there on it became a different band, with a different singer, drummer, rotating panel of guitarists, but with the same ideas/songs from before, which were written more as a group effort – however, on the first 2 records, they would all be credited with Harris, which made him out to be a creative mastermind.
This is not to diminish Harris his achievements, if he had not acted this way Maiden would have never become the band we all love(d). You can hear, from their contribution to Metal for Muthas, to the first LP, how much Iron Maiden developed in style, precision and aggression. Clive Burr being a big part of that. Human resources, baby. How they play Wrathchild in 1978 or in 1981…big difference. Also, later, the inclusion of Adrian Smith, who is a great guitarist, perfected the band.
And songs like Remember Tomorrow, Running Free, Killers, NOTB, there are no rumours about these songs written by others than Harris, and they are great ffn songs. My personal favorite is Genghis Khan. Up the hammers!
I apologize if I went on a Maiden tangent, this being Intl Slayer day. But Slayer started out quite Maiden-esque. I even got a Kerrang from 1982 describing Slayer as such. Does anyone agree, that the second part of Crionics could have been an Iron Maiden song? Phantom of the Opwera part II. Grtz
piece of mind is my favorite
Somewhere in Time is Maiden’s most impressive work.
Brett, what do you think of Loudness, especially their 80’s output?
I enjoyed Loudness. I have not listened to it for years however. That is not its fault, more like my tastes streamlined. I remember them indulging in the excesses of heavy metal, but in a playful way.