Above: Slayer performs "Raining Blood" in December 2006.
Slayer put on a hit parade Saturday night at Memorial Hall. The lowly lords of all riffs vertebrae-impounding delivered a set designed to summon skyward a thousand devil signs and pumping fists.
It opened with “Disciple,” Tom Araya’s grizzled mane swinging centrifugally, like old times. He’s grown appealingly goatish — more sage on a mountain than satyr of Hades.
Case in point: When Araya looked out to the crowd, grinning, and commented on the swathe of “smiling faces,” he prompted a volley of boos, hisses and thumbs-downs.
Humor, irony: Those things are gladly exiled from Slayer’s realm. The purism has served them well. The rabid devotees— head-bobbing, whooping, fomenting the mosh pit in a slow stir of well-muscled flesh — got what they wanted: “Raining Blood,” “Die by the Sword,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Blood Red,” “War Ensemble,” “Angel of Death.”
Laser lights that couldn’t have been less appropriate or distractive lacerated the smoky haze. The strobes, too, were radically unpleasant. They alternately shone in a blurred swirl on Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman as they hewed dueling solos, fingers skittering over arpeggios like infernal incubi clambering earthward.
Those sort of lighting acrobatics should really be reserved for John Mayer, or at least something lighter than the almighty Slayer.
There were the sinewy skinheads, neck-tattooed metalheads, punks in patch-worked Napalm Death jackets, golden oldies who cut their hair a decade ago but haven’t retired their leather jackets just yet.
Defying the nostril-petrifying weather, many shunned coats to display ink. I even saw a few derma-devotions to the band. They played for an hour and a half, though it felt much shorter because they didn’t pull the prissy act of leaving the stage for a chai tea break, like many decades-old bands that have achieved Slayer’s level of success.
It’s a challenge to get inebriated in such an interval, minus some pre-game swillage. But obviously successful in this endeavor was the dude who tapped my friend Kathleen and me simultaneously on the shoulders during “Angel of Death” and then, bent backwards as though staggering beneath the hefty awesomeness of his mimicry, delivered with his fingers an air guitar solo. His tongue waggled lasciviously, as if to say “Check it out, ladies.”
As the laser lights died and the floor lights brightened, the mass exited, many growling honorifics in a bastardized chorus of “SLAYERRRRR!” At the merchandise table, $50 shirts went largely unpurchased, though vintage Slayer shirts were plentiful. Araya might have to see a chiropractor now to counteract all that limber-necked headbanging, and the band, collectively, might have 50 percent less hair than 25 years ago. Nonetheless, Slayer can still liberally dole out the hard, the fast and the righteously impious.
(Read more about Slayer here.)
| Ashley Brown, The Star
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