MindCrime Reviews #3: Reign In Blood - Slayer

For the third album review in my new series, let’s talk about an album I’ve had a great disdain for for a long damn time.

The vast majority of not only Slayer fans, but metal fans in general consider this to be Slayer’s magnum opus, their greatest work to date. And I’ve never understood it. As someone who loves and listens to as much music as I do, this album honestly makes me feel insulted, and how people can like or love this is beyond me. I’ll get more into why I hate this album later on when I actually get into it.

#1: Angel Of Death
This song is one of two saving graces on this album. It’s got a great riff, a surprisingly good vocal performance from Tom, and some incredible drumming from Lombardo. It’s among Slayer’s best, and is one of the few good things that came out of this album. The lyrics themselves are about the Nazi scientist by the name of Josef Mengele, and the atrocities he committed.
It really takes me back to 6th grade... 10/10

Score: 10/100

#2: Piece By Piece
This goddamn substanceless, soulless, filler piece of sh*t is really when I start to realize the main problem with this album. The entire album is practically nothing but filler and the songs are all way too short! The entire album is essentially one big interlude two real songs on it! It’s all just a bunch of generic heavy riffs with random, emotionless shredding guitar solos with intentionally, needlessly violent lyrics that have no real purpose other than to shock you. At least with the opening track, there’s something to get out of it not only because it’s a great song, but because the lyrics have meaning. It’s about the atrocities of a Nazi scientist in WWII. This is just needlessly violent garbage. And it’s a shame that they cranked the bass up on this trash song. 1/10

Score: 11/100

#3: Necrophobic
It has the exact same problems that Piece By Piece has. It’s just a bunch of hyper violent drivel with fast, heavy riffs and random solos with no emotion and mediocre vocals. The entire album is like this. I can understand some interludes, but not this many! 1/10

Score: 12/100

#4: Altar Of Sacrifice
You know, for an album that’s only 29 minutes long, this really is painful to get through. This song was actually blamed for the murder of a girl by a group of teenagers whom offered her as a sacrifice to Satan to make their music better. The song itself isn’t quite as insulting as the two that preceded it, but that really isn’t saying much. 3/10

Score: 15/100

#5: Jesus Saves
Instead of hyper violent trash, it’s hyper anti religion trash! I’m not a religious person; I’m actually an atheist, but this song sucks. It has no other purpose other than “Christianity sucks!”. If you want to talk about how hypocritical and arguably terrible religion is in your music, that’s fine by me because I’m neutral about religion. If you’re religious, I don’t care and if you’re atheist I don’t care. I don’t believe and I’m not a person who goes out of their way to insult it either. But this is just pointless. And the song itself is just incredibly forced and bland. The entire album very clearly had very little to no effort put into it by the band, and the music suffers from it. 2/10

Score: 17/100

#6: Criminally Insane
This is one of the less terrible fillers. It’s got a decent riff, but other than that it’s just very bland and boring. It’s not as god awful as Necrophobic or Epidemic per se, but it’s still awful. 2/10

Score: 19/100

#7: Reborn
Another filler interlude. No surprise there. The vocals in particular feel very rushed, and it’s overall very dumb lyrically as well. I hate this song and this album. Please end already! The songs on this album that aren’t terrible should have been on South Of Heaven instead, which is a far superior album. The rest should have been thrown out, and this album shouldn’t even have existed. 2/10

Score: 22/100

#8: Epidemic
The vocals feel less rushed than Reborn, and the song itself isn’t as forced as some of the other trash interludes on this abomination of an album, but this is still horrible. 3/10

Score: 25/100

#9: Postmortem
This isn’t awful. It’s actually refreshingly average after those other seven pieces of trash, but it’s by no means good. Not really much to say about this otherwise. 5/10

Score: 30/100

#10: Raining Blood
And we finally get to the end, with everyone’s favorite, Raining Blood. I’m going to be honest: they bookended this album with the two best on it. It’s a very good song, especially for this album, but it is overrated. I don’t feel rewarded for sitting through 20 minutes of garbage! The whole album was filler, and this and the opening track were the only good things about it. 8/10

Overall rating: 38/100

I’ve never understood why this album is so loved. For me, both objectively and subjectively, this is a f*cking terrible album! I hate this album, it’s their worst by far and by far the most overrated metal album I’ve heard. Diabolus In Musica was more competent. It’s fine if you like it, even though I don’t understand why or how...

Comments

I don't think that the album is as bad as you make it out to be, but I agree that it isn't very good. The one song that I HATE however, is Jesus Saves, I'm not a Christian, but I absolutely despise atheists like this. The kinds of people who will go out of their way to discount people's own personal beliefs in the rudest way possible. The lyrical content in the song is some of my least favourite ever - visitor

I agree about Jesus Saves. I’ve seen worse but this is still god awful HA - visitor