Slayer
Decade Of Aggression - Live

To pay tribute to the first 10 years of the career of one of the bands that has undoubtedly influenced the entire modern music scene, on October 22, 1991, "Decade Of Aggression" was released, the first official live album by the legendary Slayer.
Composed of two CDs (the first recorded at the Lakeland Coliseum in Lakeland, Florida on July 13, 1991, and the second partly recorded at Wembley Arena in London on October 14, 1990, and at the Orange Pavilion in San Bernardino, California), it represents what "Live Shit" is for Metallica, "Live After Death" for Iron Maiden, or, to make it clearer, "Made In Japan" for Deep Purple. By now, you will have realized that I am in front of a monumental live album, an absurd manifesto of malevolence enclosed in 21 songs.
"Decade Of Aggression" had the great fortune of being recorded during a period that can be considered the peak of the Californian four-piece's career (which unfortunately ended there) that from their debut until then had been able to create six masterpieces of inestimable value over six albums released.
A more than successful move by the Huntington Park quartet, cemented especially by the great success in sales.

Now I will try to describe this gig as best as I can, attempting to tarnish it as little as possible because it would be outrageous to neglect even one of these songs, but you will also understand that it is impossible to properly expand on all of them because:
1) the reviewer would need to spend 1 hour on each of them, thus leading to suicide due to a nervous breakdown :0 ;
2) about 99.9% of you will already know these songs by heart (except for that impurity represented by the usual asshole who comments on albums without ever having listened to them, rating them with a flat 1 because for some unknown reason, this genre gets on their nerves, as always the most tormented of all).

...Join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us, join us... WELCOME BACK!!!!! The concert is obviously opened with the hellish Hell Awaits, which thanks to its hallucinatory intro invites us to enter the sound hell created by the four from Los Angeles and leads us to the glorious The Antichrist, at the end of which will come the then-new War Ensemble, destined to be one of the assassins' warhorses.
We take a moment to calm down (as calm as a Slayer song can be) with the extraordinary South Of Heaven, which possesses one of the most beautiful opening riffs I have ever heard and finally brings us to explore the masterpiece Reign In Blood thanks to the trident Raining Blood-Altar Of Sacrifice-"esus Saves... Three true manifestos of pure violence! We now reach the psychedelic Dead Skin Mask and the spectacular Seasons In The Abyss, which ends with the much-requested Mandatory Suicide, where the final part spoken by Araya is heart-attack inducing.
Great CD, but at this point, we feel that something is missing to reach perfection, in fact, the timeless Angel Of Death, almost certainly the most famous track by the four and probably also of extreme Thrash, arrives massively, which can only end this great concert beautifully.

The second CD is practically a revisitation of the latest arrival "Seasons In The Abyss" which is completely stripped of 8 songs out of 10, 5 of which are on this disc, meaning half of the songs.
It begins quietly with the immediately violent Hallowed Point, which catapults us into the great Blood Red, another very beautiful track.
Finally, we take a step back into the past of "Show No Mercy" with the duo Die By The Sword-Black Magic, in my opinion, the two best-played songs that give input to another "oldie," that is Captor Of Sins, featured on the EP "Haunting The Chapel," which stands its ground well.
After Born On Fire comes the great and indispensable PostMortem, which preludes the new Spirit In Black and Expendable Youth, which give Chemical Warfare the task of closing this album with a bang as well.

In general, one thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that no song is presented in a subdued manner, thanks to the great performance of Tom and Jerry's group, sorry, Kerry (funny guy :] ).
The four play in a monstrous way: the two axes of the Jeff Hanneman-Kerry King duo cut as usual and unleash a real duel of solos that we could compare to splinters that devastate the listener's ear. Tom Araya, with his aggressive voice, unfortunately less rich than in the past due to the now non-existent use of falsetto singing and ear-splitting high notes, but still more than effective, energetically presents all the songs, showing all his charisma while mercilessly thrashing the E string of his ESP (let us remember that Tom also has the task of playing bass). Last but not least, the great Dave Lombardo, who once and for all proves to be one of the best skin beaters of the scene (listen to the crowd when he does the double bass drum solo in Angel Of Death).
The production is also good, rightly putting the guitars in the forefront, although in various passages the volumes of the two six-strings are not balanced.

The only flaw that the live has is the excessive presence of songs taken from "Seasons," in fact, many minor songs could and should have been replaced with the big excluded ones like Evil Has No Boundaries, Kill Again, Criminally Insane, Silent Scream, and Live Undead just to name a few, without thus disadvantaging the unfortunately neglected masterpieces Hell Awaits and especially South Of Heaven.
But who the hell cares, a great live nonetheless that deserves a 5 without a second thought!!!
The best Thrash live of all time, what do you say?

P.S. The cover you see above is part of the old print, while in the new one you find Jeff Hanneman playing guitar against a red background.