Slayer
World Painted Blood

When faced with a Slayer record, one probably already imagines what is etched in its grooves even before listening, because Slayer's is a trademark. Innovation, musical exploration, or experimentation are not to be sought; instead, the venomous malevolence and the raw ferocity of each song should be savored, putting aside compromises because Slayer has never known them.

With an album like "World Painted Blood", it's useless to get lost in chatter; there’s no room for frills: they are not welcome in Slayer's house. To fully enjoy yet another work from the Californian quartet, one has to let themselves be transported into the depths of darkness and human decay told by Tom Araya's screams, accompanied by all the ferocity that Kerry King, Jeff Hannemann, and Dave Lombardo are capable of.

The album starts very well; the opening track, "World Painted Blood", is immediately engaging, it seems like a thrash piece from another era, of excellent workmanship that flows riff after riff while Tom Araya screams horrifying and apocalyptic verses, as per the manual. The subsequent songs are very apt and maintain the high level of the album; "Unit 731" leaves no room to breathe, "Snuff" despite a less than stellar beginning entrusted to chaos unleashed by a completely nonsensical guitar solo, quickly turns into one of the album’s best pieces, with a chorus where the riffing makes it clear that Hannemann and King are still the pair of bastards we know well. At times, the album is really dark and gloomy, as in the very successful "Beauty Through Order" or the peculiar "Playing With The Dolls", which recall the hallucinatory atmospheres of "South of Heaven" times, but it's the violence that reigns in pieces like "Public Display of Dismemberment", "Psychopathic Red", and "Hate Worldwide", which through the usual formula tested and unchanged over the years, confront us with Slayer’s ability to be very concrete in composition, making the tracks varied and well-structured without falling into the banal.

Certainly, repeating oneself at high levels after having already birthed one’s masterpieces is not easy at all, so the album at times seems a bit stale and the too frequent insertion of solos reeks of filler, but one cannot help but appreciate a genuine blind fury that springs from the minds of four people who, despite worldwide fame and influence over generations and different musical styles (within metal), still have something to say. Finally, there's the band’s choice to use a bare and essential production, which ultimately proves to be a double-edged sword: the sounds are drier and more natural, the drums show no triggers demonstrating how heavy they can pound and play without using digital and extremely elaborate sounds, however, the guitars seem a bit too bare, a bit more distortion wouldn’t have hurt.