On 13 July 1991 the Lakeland Civic Center in Florida, billed on the record as the Lakeland Coliseum, took eleven songs to the chest, and that night became the first disc of Decade of Aggression, released by Def American on 22 October 1991. Recorded by the Californian quartet that had spent ten years turning every hall it played into a killing ground, produced by Rick Rubin with the band beside him at the desk, mixed by Brendan O'Brien and mastered by Howie Weinberg, the double album went out with not one guitar overdub laid over the tape, which for a live record of that era was close to a confession. Nothing was repaired. Nothing was dressed.
Treat it as a flight recorder. A black box does not edit the turbulence out, does not re-record the engine that coughed, does not flatter the pilot, and that is exactly the job this record does for Slayer: Tom Araya, Jeff Hanneman, Kerry King and Dave Lombardo, captured on the last run of the classic four before the drummer left in 1992, with every rough edge and every small slip kept on the tape as evidence. It is the band's first official live album. It sits between Seasons in the Abyss in 1990 and Divine Intervention in 1994, and it is the last Slayer release with Lombardo behind the kit before that departure.
The second disc is assembled from two other nights, Wembley Arena in London on 14 October 1990 and the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino on 8 March 1991, and here is the small miracle of the mix: three rooms, two countries and nine months of touring fuse into what plays like a single gig. Twenty one songs, one siege. The sequencing never lets the seams show, and the record charted accordingly, number 55 on the Billboard 200, number 29 in Britain, number 35 in Germany, for a double live set of songs about war, murder and damnation. Kerry King put the point plainly, years later: "that was our first live experience, the first anyone could have Slayer live unless it was a tape-trading kind of thing… we were proud of it" (Blabbermouth.net, "The Vinyl Conflict", 15 November 2010).
The Californian four kick the door in with "Hell Awaits", the 1985 title track promoted to opening salvo, and it does what an opening salvo is for: it knocks the hinges off and lets "The Antichrist" storm through the breach right behind it. As a one-two to open a live album, it could hardly be bettered. The engine room is audible from the first bar. Lombardo's double bass hammers like a riveting gun on a girder, the bass guitar is actually present in the mix instead of being swallowed by the two guitars, and the tempo changes land with the snap of a rifle bolt.
I feel like the stuff I did before "Decade of Aggression" was very immature.
Dave Lombardo, Musicalypse, August 2010
That line explains the record better than any sleeve note could. The drummer heard himself arrive here, and the evidence agrees with him. Played without a net, the songs from Reign in Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss stand shoulder to shoulder in one long barrage of steel on asphalt, driven from the back by a man who had finally caught up with his own hands.
"Raining Blood" arrives fifth, in the middle of the Lakeland set, between "South of Heaven" and "Altar of Sacrifice", where most bands would have hoarded it for the encore. Its old partner "Postmortem", the song that led into it on Reign in Blood, was exiled to the second disc, which is the one sequencing decision on the album that makes no sense at all. The song survives the separation. Placed fifth, "Raining Blood" stops being the finale and becomes the hinge of the set, the steel pin on which the first half of the night swings into the second.
The strain is the sound of a man leaving nothing in the tank, ten months into a tour, and a cleaner take would have been a smaller one.
The first disc closes on "Angel of Death", and it closes it the way a demolition crew closes a building: everything goes down at once. After ten songs at full throttle, the last blow of the Lakeland set lands hardest, and it leaves the second disc with the harder job of following it. "Chemical Warfare" ends the whole record, a song from the 1984 Haunting the Chapel EP, a reminder of how far back the arsenal reaches.
The thing that holds the album back is the room itself. The crowd is so far down in the mix that the record sometimes sounds like a band playing in an empty hangar, and a live album should let you hear the people it is aimed at. The voice is the other argument the record starts and refuses to settle. Araya at the top of his screams can be heard as a singer past the edge of his range or as a singer in a fistfight with his own songs. The second reading wins. The strain is the sound of a man leaving nothing in the tank, ten months into a tour, and a cleaner take would have been a smaller one. The live record with the cracks in it beats the one that sounds suspiciously like the studio album with applause pasted on, and this is the first kind.
Decade of Aggression is the unvarnished field report of the classic four at full strength, recorded with no safety net and released with no repairs, and it is the last word from that line-up before the drummer's chair changed hands. Anyone who loves the run from Reign in Blood to Seasons in the Abyss needs it, because it proves the songs were not a studio trick. Anyone who wants a polished live document with the crowd roaring in the front row should look elsewhere. Ignore it and you miss the flight recorder from the band's finest years, pulled from the wreckage still running.