Forty years ago today, on 7 October 1986, Slayer released Reign In Blood. The anniversary is being marked with a single LP whose grooves sit under a layer of crimson red liquid, a zoetrope pressing sold exclusively through Sound Of Vinyl from 20 November.
The numbers are the part worth keeping. Ten songs, twenty eight minutes and fifty eight seconds, a Gold certification, and four decades in which nothing about the record has been revised. It was the band's first album with Rick Rubin producing, cut by Tom Araya, Kerry King, Jeff Hanneman and Dave Lombardo.
A liquid filled zoetrope is a collector's object rather than a listening one: the disc carries a printed pattern meant to animate as the record turns, under a sealed layer of liquid. The format has gone from novelty to routine on anniversary pressings over the last few years, and the reason is that it sells at a price a plain reissue cannot ask for.
Which is the quiet economics of a catalogue this size. The album is already on every shelf that wants it, so the fortieth anniversary is not sold on the music. It is sold on the object.