Twenty-eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds. Add up the ten running times and that is all of Reign in Blood, a figure so small it looks like a misprint, and it argues harder than any adjective thrown at this record in the four decades since. Released through Def Jam on 7 October 1986 and cut at Hit City West in Los Angeles with Rick Rubin producing and Andy Wallace engineering, the third full-length from the Californian four came down on the thrash of its day the way a burst dam comes down on a valley town, all at once and from above, tearing out the bridges, the fences and every polite idea about album length. Nobody downstream was ready. Some of them are still bailing.
The pressure behind that wall had been building for three years. The quartet that made Show No Mercy in 1983 and Hell Awaits in 1985, Tom Araya on bass and vocals, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman on guitars and Dave Lombardo on drums, had been watched at The Ritz in New York during the 1985 CMJ New Music Seminar by a producer whose label had made its name on hip-hop, and Rubin signed Slayer to it. The songs came in short. Nobody stretched them.
The record went out at twenty-nine minutes, and that brevity is the whole of its case. I have yet to meet a thrash album that lost an argument by being shorter, and this one wins its argument before most of its rivals have finished tuning.
What Rubin and Wallace built around the band is less a studio sound than a spillway: a smooth concrete channel with no floodplain on either side and no reverb for the noise to spread into, so the whole tonnage of the playing reaches the listener at the velocity it left the amplifiers, every drum and every cymbal holding its own shape in the current. That dryness is the engineering secret of the record. Nothing pools. Nothing echoes. The riffs, tighter and faster than anything the band had cut before, arrive one behind another like water that has found the only way down the hill.
The wall gives way
"Angel of Death" is the crack running up the face of the dam. Four minutes and fifty-one seconds, the longest thing on the record, it opens on Araya's scream and then lets the full reservoir through, Hanneman's riffs knocking down whatever the scream left standing and Lombardo driving underneath without mercy and without a single wasted stroke. Hanneman wrote it about Josef Mengele and the experiments at Auschwitz. It was read otherwise. Accusations that the band sympathised with the Nazis followed, Columbia, which distributed Def Jam, refused to handle the album, and Geffen Records took over the distribution with its own logo left off the sleeve. The band did not drop the song. It still opens the record, and the record would not stand without it.
None of it held the water back. Pushed out through a distributor that would not put its name on the sleeve, the album climbed to number 94 on the Billboard 200, reached number 47 in the United Kingdom and was certified gold in the United States on 20 November 1992, six years after release, by which point the flood had soaked into the foundations of every extreme band that came after it. The bill arrived late. It was paid in full.
From there the flood goes into the streets. "Piece by Piece" runs two minutes and two seconds, "Necrophobic" one minute and forty-one, and the stretch through "Altar of Sacrifice", "Jesus Saves", "Criminally Insane", "Reborn" and "Epidemic" never lets a song pass the three-minute mark. "Criminally Insane" sits at the dead centre, track six of ten, and it is the one to hand anybody who asks what the middle of this album is for: two minutes and twenty-two seconds of water at its highest in the town square, pouring through doors, carrying off whatever was not bolted down, unsparing and without a second spent on anything that does not push the current forward.
Rain on the drowned valley
"Postmortem" is the last held breath. At three minutes and twenty-seven seconds it is the third longest song here, and it begins by holding its tempo back, the water standing still for a moment against the last wall before it goes. It does not stop when it ends. It runs straight into "Raining Blood", and that is the right order: the pause, then the deluge.
"Raining Blood" is the valley going under. It opens on thunder and falling rain, climbs out of that storm into the riff the whole album has been building toward, and at the end the band shreds the song into noise and hands the last word back to the rain, a closer that does not so much finish the record as submerge it, roofs, steeples and all. Of the ten songs it is the one that has outlived the flood, its main riff still standing above the waterline long after the town beneath it has gone.
What the water takes with it
The flaw is the nature of the flood itself. Water moving that fast does not respect borders, and the seven songs between the opener and "Postmortem" run into each other the way a flood erases the fences between gardens. Taken one at a time, each is a clean, hard, no quarter piece of thrash; taken at speed, as the record insists on being taken, "Reborn" and "Epidemic" are hard to tell apart, and the middle of the album is remembered as one torrent rather than seven songs. That is a real cost. It was worth paying. When South of Heaven arrived in 1988, the band had chosen not to breach the same dam twice, and that choice is its own verdict on how completely the first breach had done its work.
A dam does not negotiate with the valley, and neither does this record.
This is the high-water mark painted on the wall in 1986, the line every extreme metal record since has been held up against, docked only for the stretch in the middle where the songs drown each other out. For anyone who thinks the heavy end of the music began with growls and blast beats, it is the missing chapter, and it takes less time to read than a lunch break. It costs twenty-nine minutes. Anybody who has not spent them yet is standing in a dry valley with the reservoir full above.