- TIM TRONCKOE
An old, robed man opens a microwave oven and puts a cockroach inside. He sets the power to high and cranks the timer for as long as it will go. Slayer’s “God Send Death” begins. The old man laughs, loose and yowling. Slayer’s napalm guitars lay out in fired lines as the cockroach jolts and spasms in a panic, looking for a way out. Its roach thoughts are, “Fucking fuck. Hot. HOT. Inside me? SCALDing. Out of here. Whaat the f-FUCK is happening??!” Tom Araya screams (from the diaphragm), “Watch you die inside!!!” Double-kick drums batter, splatter, and ram. In its previous life, the cockroach was 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Now he’s on his back with insect legs flicking in the air, being cooked from the inside. For 30 years, 11 studio albums, and two Grammys, Slayer’s rifling, exacted thrash metal has dealt with dark, unpretty subject matters. In “Necrophiliac,” you’ve got sex with the dead; “Jihad” is told from a terrorist’s perspective. It can be uncomfortable, even controversial. Their album Christ Illusion was banned from India in 2006. But they’re just songs, remember. Sadly, this past May, guitarist and founding member Jeff Hanneman passed away from liver failure. A great one, was he. Tom Araya spoke from his home in Texas.
The way you play and sing, it’s no fucking cakewalk. A song like “Necrophobic.” You’re moving through a minefield at high speed. What’s it like doing that song?
Out of everything we’ve ever done, that one has to be the most obscure one to sing and play—with the timing of that riff change. When we did the album, we made all the music first, and didn’t really have any lyrics. When we practiced in the garage on Hope Street, we knew the songs musically, and recorded them without vocals in like a week. Jeff had ideas written, but nothing was complete. We wrote the lyrics in the studio—I didn’t have a whole lot of time to get inside the songs and feel them out. That song in particular, when you listen to what’s being played, and then what I’m singing, [pauses] it’s a fucked-up song [laughs]. It took a while for me to be able to do it. The crazy melody line, and the way the riffs are played, compared to what I’m singing. It’s a bunch of hurdles. And having to get that knee up just perfectly to get past that hurdle was really hard.
Slayer play the WaMu Theater tonight.
