It was the first Slayer album to feature Tom Araya in a major creative role I guess at that time, Kerry was hitting a dry spell."ģ. "I had just gotten married and moved to Phoenix, so I was probably the odd man out at that point, and I'm sure I didn't participate as much because of that." "We go through dry spells sometimes," Hanneman added, "but the good thing about having two guitar players that can write music is that you've never gonna go without. "That album was my most lackluster performance," King admitted to Decibel in 2006. Though guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman co-wrote seven of the ten tracks on Reign in Blood - "Angel of Death" and "Post-Mortem" were the only songs written entirely by Hanneman, while "Piece by Piece" was all King's - King contributed music for only three songs on South of Heaven: "Silent Scream," "Mandatory Suicide" and "Ghosts of War". Kerry King went through a "dry spell" during the writing of the album We wanted to mix it up and make our show more of a rollercoaster ride."Ģ. We had done Reign in Blood, and we said, 'Let's give them something they won't expect.' And it was also to make the live sets more interesting, because to go up there and just play fast, it's a barrage that people can't take.
The only time we made a collective decision to do something different was with South of Heaven. "We don't do concepts," King told Guitar World in 2006. "It's all just whoever comes up with what," guitarist Jeff Hanneman told KNAC radio in 2004.īut with South of Heaven, the band actually gave some serious thought to how the album should sound before any of the songs had even been written. Throughout Slayer's lengthy career, the band has always taken a pretty straightforward approach to creating albums: Write songs individually, work them out as a band, and then record them. It was the only Slayer album ever written with a specific game plan in mind Video of SLAYER - Mandatory Suicide Live 88ġ. In honor of the record's enduring brilliance, here are nine things you might not know about South of Heaven. 4 on Revolver's fan poll of the all-time greatest Slayer songs. Decades on, South of Heaven is now rightly considered to be one of Slayer's finest albums, and its title track recently came in at No. 57 on the Billboard 200 album chart, it gave the band their best chart showing to date. Rather than further painting themselves into a hard/fast corner, the record effectively served notice that Slayer were growing as musicians and songwriters, and when the record peaked at No. Though some Slayer fans were disappointed by the change in musical approach, South of Heaven turned out to be an artistic and commercial success. We just kind of mellowed out a little bit - not mellow, but slowed down." That's why we did South of Heaven and Seasons. "We're not going to be able to beat that. "It was just like, we're not going to be able to top that whole album," guitarist Jeff Hanneman told Revolver.
Rather than trying to duplicate Reign in Blood, the band wisely chose to demonstrate that they could be just as fearsome at a slower rate of speed. Bassist/vocalist Tom Araya was actually singing for the first time, and the closing "Spill the Blood" - another doomy groover - even featured clean guitar tones in its intro. Sure, there were still plenty of rapid-fire riffs to be heard on the likes of "Silent Scream," "Ghosts of War" and "Cleanse the Soul," but the album-opening title track was practically Sabbathesque in its doomy plod, while cuts like "Behind the Crooked Cross," "Mandatory Suicide" and "Read Between the Lies" were all built upon swinging mid-tempo grooves. Instead of brief bursts of full-on brutality, the Rick Rubin-produced South of Heaven took a left turn into slower, more dynamic territory. Released on July 5th, 1988, Slayer's fourth full-length came as something of a shock to those who were expecting the pioneering SoCal thrash quartet to pick up exactly where the rampaging assault of 1986's Reign in Blood had left off. But none of these mighty thrash offerings were as surprising - or as controversial - as Slayer's South of Heaven. A banner year for American thrash metal, 1988 gave us such classics as Metallica's …And Justice for All, Megadeth's So Far, So Good… So What, Anthrax's State of Euphoria, Testament's The New Order, Death Angel's Frolic Through the Park, Vio-Lence's Eternal Nightmare, Flotsam and Jetsam's No Place for Disgrace, and Nuclear Assault's Survive.
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