You hear a lot of people talking these days about their nostalgia for the 1980s or the decade following. It always provokes a couple blinks, and then we — we are the silent witnesses, who saw it all — shrug and walk on. It is easy enough to understand.
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Today we mark the ten year anniversary of the death of Jeff Hanneman, guitarist and composer for Slayer, which along with Hellhamer, Sodom, Master, and Bathory contributed to the old school and modern death metal vocabulary and spirit.
28 CommentsTags: death metal, jeff hanneman, slayer, Speed Metal
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!
32 CommentsTags: international day of slayer, National Day of Slayer, slayer, Speed Metal
Poised somewhere between speed metal and death metal, Slayer re-invented heavy metal by incorporating punk and classical structures with trademark raging speed, complex arrangements, occult and literary allusions, and intricate rapid-fire guitar solos.
17 CommentsTags: death metal, metal blade records, slayer, Speed Metal
From the flood of nonsense going through the news feeds, a sign that speed metal has gone mainstream:
A woman in New Zealand, refusing to bring another Mackenzie or Jack into the world, has named her three kids “Metallica,” “Pantera,” and “Slayer.”
Farrier reached out to New Zealand’s Registrar-General to inquire as to whether “there are any restrictions naming babies after band names, or albums.” He was told that there aren’t, “as long as the word used is not generally considered to be offensive or does not resemble an official rank or title.” This may rule out naming a baby after one of your favorite grindcore acts, but it did allow Farrier to verify the fact that Baby Metallica’s middle name is also—we’re not kidding—“And Justice For All.”
These kids will either have the best or absolute worst time in school, depending primarily on whether ‘80s thrash is currently cool with the youth—and whether lil’ Metallica has to deal with terrible classmates like “Napster” and “Decent Snare Drum Mixing.”
After nu-metal introduced chunky monkey riffs and gargled horse semen vocals to mainstream audiences, the percussive fast strumming riffs of Metallica, Overkill, Testament, Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, and their derivates (Pantera) probably seem tame, as do the later Slayer albums built around bouncy riffs and plaintively angry vocals.
When even Alex Jones uses Metallica songs for his interstitial music, and nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s has overwhelmed a Western Civilization looking at the post-Clinton neo-Communist NWO disaster at the same time that people are seeking music from a mentally less muddled time, speed metal has become the archetype of all heavy metal, and therefore, has been easily assimilated by industry and mass culture.
Perhaps this explains why so many of the original death metal and black metal bands chose proudly to be underground, figuring that a few years of musical and artistic honesty would beat out becoming a careerist in a corrupt industry only to morph into Dad Rock as their fans aged into complacent suburban wage-serfdom.
6 CommentsTags: metallica, new zealand, pantera, slayer, Speed Metal
It’s that time of year again. Celebrate the International Day of Slayer (a riff on the National Day of Prayer) by blasting Slayer loud all day and all night with a new live set and 1983 demo from Slayer for download.
16 CommentsTags: National Day of Slayer, slayer
Alongside Hellhammer, Bathory, and Sodom, Slayer helped invent the raw sound of death metal, which combined the literality of hardcore with the imaginative atmospheres of heavy metal and the structural composition of progressive rock and classical.
10 CommentsTags: death metal, jeff hanneman, slayer
Metal worships the extreme and natural, such as death, war, disease, horror, and disaster. This allows it to snap out of the normal human social bubble, where we only talk about pleasant things, and to accept life as it is, which in turn enables metalheads to perceive the beauty inherent in our chaotic world.
24 CommentsTags: censorship, license plates, slayer
Slayer showed us the prototypical underground metal band, fusing together melodic heavy metal (Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Judas Priest) and high-speed hardcore to make a new voice for metal. It kept the metal spirit entirely, and turned up the volume on that, but also gave the music the voice of desperation amid dystopian decay where everything is broken and wrong that made hardcore so apocalyptic.
14 CommentsTags: ambient metal, nocturnal metal, slayer, south of heaven, subconscious
Toiletovhell, a website created after a group of individuals were too soft for Metalsucks and their safe space politics and had to find somewhere even more pathetic to talk about metal. The aesthetics and writing style are even worse than Metalsucks and focus on self deprecating humour mixed with a lack of ability to actually understand anything they talk about. A herd like move towards inclusive and left wing politics has attracted a few other weak individuals on Twitter to constantly push around the same hilarious ideas in exchange for acceptance and “friendship” in the form of retweets. Naturally this wasn’t going to get them anymore exposure as the number of self proclaimed Black metal fans that love bands like “Dimmu Borgir” and “White Ward” yet are horrified or oblivious to the actual classics of the genre. Some time ago Joe and his cohorts had decided to attack DMU on two separate occasions that failed completely before resorting to small jabs on Twitter. After having gone through their website after their attack on DMU, I wasn’t interested in pursuing a bunch of forty year old men who had no actual musical education and a sufficient lack of political culture to be taken seriously. Yet it has come to my attention that Joe is so desperate for any kind of gossip that has called me out on his website for creating intricate sex scenarios revolving him and his wife. It’s time to flush Joe into the toilet once and for all.
87 CommentsTags: dimmu borgir, Joe thrash n kill, losers, mental retardation, neckbeard deathcamp, Noisey, slayer, toiletovhell, vice, white ward
