»6th October 2006

Music Review: Slayer - Christ Illusion

I've been wanting to review this for quite some time. There is an incomplete review of it which you can find if you're feeling hardcore. This album is precisely what I wanted from Slayer for their new album. It's pretty much a non-stop riff fest, which is awesome. The album is triple filtered and distilled of bullshit, as with all Slayer albums, it cuts the fucking bullshit and so is awarded with the prestigious medal of 0% Bullshit. You're probably wondering what the preoccupation with bovine feces is all about. Well I'll let these fans from the War at the Warfield DVD tell you.

The album continues what has sort of become a Slayer tradition by having just ten tracks and has a running time under forty minutes. Unsurprisingly, the themes covered on Christ Illusion are the old stalwarts of war, religion and society, basically how much all three suck. The album of course has courted controversy for a variety of reasons:
The album artwork which has been criticised by reactionary idiots in America for supposedly depicting a 'doped up' Jesus with no arms stood in a sea of blood with floating body parts- real wholesome stuff. I say 'supposedly' because I'm not sure what exactly brought them to that conclusion, he seems to be looking upward, and he has an eye patch, is that what doped up people look like? God fearing pirate? The album artwork was done by the same guy who did the covers for Reign In Blood, South of Heaven and Seasons in the Abyss. I think album artwork is very important, and this is some really cool album artwork.
The album has also courted controversy for the song Jihad, which is about the 9/11 terrorist attacks but is told from the terrorist's perspective. A song exploring the motivations of terrorists and the meaning of martyrdom is a good thing in my opinion. At the very least it's covering similar ground to the film United 93, which went into shedding some light on the terrorists, I don't know whether that was considered controversial and as with Slayer I didn't feel it was pulling any of its punches on the issue. Slayer faces the same old accusations on Jihad that they did on Angel of Death. They sing about Al Qaeda terrorists, the holocast and Dr. Mengele and his 'experiments' so that means they agree with them and think they're great? I don't really need to point out how idiotic that opinion is. It's pretty clear to anyone who actually listens to Jihad or Angel of Death that the band don't condone mass murder or hate jews or anything. Slayer sing about shocking and horrific things, but what's worse, that a heavy metal band sings about these things or that these things have actually happened? Let's not think about these things, let's not understand them, let's be racist, intolerant and deny the holocaust.
One good thing about whoever it is who finds these things controversial is that they really open themselves to arguments they have no hope of winning without Ostrich tactics. First Amendment anyone?
Time to highlight some highlights on the album. I'm going to be dishing out further medals and awards in this.

1. Flesh Storm. This starts off with an awesome fade in and then dives straight into a Seasons-in-the-Abyss-esque beat. This starts the album off with an absolutely awesome riff. Further letting you know how the rest of the album is going to be, the first solo is of course awesome. The lyrics are suitably pissed off and delivered with an acidic (prepare for more inappropriate adjectives, silly music review ahoy!) bite.


2. Catalyst. The second song presents us yet again with another riff-fest in the chorus. It's at this point that I realised just how awesome the rest of the album was going to be when I first listened to it. One particular stand out moment on this song is the lengthy lead section with some absolutely awesome harmonising between the two guitars which I haven't really heard in a Slayer song before, the closest thing is a lead section on In The Name Of God from Diabolus In Musica. I suppose for that I'll award the song with an Innovation! medal.


3. Skeleton Christ. Straight off this song gets an awesome name medal. This starts off in a similar way to Chemical Warfare or Skeletons of Society, one guitar starts the riff, then the other joins. There are some great lyrics on this song, particularly the 'HAIL SATAN!' which is dropped in a couple of times. Good to see Slayer keepin' it real. The second Hail Satan precedes and awesome section where I often shout "break it down, yo!". This section of course leads into another awesome set of solos. Bizarrely, near the end of the song, the main riff is modified and is followed by a final solo by Hanneman which almost sounds bluesish at first. I haven't heard a solo quite like that before, very imaginative indeed, another innovation medal methinks!


4. Eyes of the Insane. After the opening volley of an (unholy) trinity of King songs, Hanneman delivers us with a solid song about war and insanity, very Hanneman-ish and VERY Mandatory Suicide-ish. Whilst not aiming for an innovation medal here, we are shown how Hanneman can still churn out a classic when he wants (the majority of the songs on Christ Illusion, as with God Hates Us All before it, are written by King). Hanneman's songs tend to be more complex and he is fond of his tempo changes. Quality lyrics from this song include a nice pre-chorus "Shell-shock, battle fatigue, overwhelming anxiety, flashbacks, panic attacks, death raising its ugly face at me".


5. Jihad. Ooh controversial! This is feels like the real centre-piece of the album. It starts off nicely with a clean-riff and throughout has some really imaginative riffs from the Jeffster. After an excessive dive bomb, the outro commences and is probably one of the best moments on the album with a relentless and surprisingly clever drum beat from Dave Lombardo. It is worth reinforcing how consistently awesome the drums are on this album, Lombardo really makes his presence felt and I feel this is a percussive highlight on the album. Yet more controversy rears it's head when the lyrics in the outro turn out to be supposedly taken from a terrorist manual which presumably the CIA must have captured and then released or something.


I'm not going to give individual reviews to tracks six to eight. Were you a complete assclown, you'd call this section filler. However, and this is a very important point, Slayer 'filler' is ten times better than most bands flagship tracks. Slayer's song writing really should be held in higher regard, you usually have a pretty difficult time being able to listen to a Slayer album and point out a track which is quite obviously the runt of the bunch. Of course, Slayer have got much better at song writing over the years, but (good) bands tend to do that anyway.
In all fairness it's an insult to call these songs filler at all, but I don't want you getting bored of me saying 'riff-tastic' and 'awesome solo section' in every song, so I thought I'd merge these three songs together. There's some really catchy rhythms in this section, certainly sounding more like the kind of songs which were on God Hates Us All. Catatonic in particular has some particularly over the top singing from Araya and some mid-tempo syncopated sections which bring back memories of Exile and Disciple.

[tangent]
The three quarters portion of an album isn't the assault of the opening overture of the first quarter, the concert set pieces of the second quarter or the ass kickers saved until the last quarter to bring things to a close. I think it is very important to listen to albums in their entirety from start to finish and I think good albums often have this kind of structure. Greatest Hits albums often suffer from a lack of structure and too often just feel like a string of singles. In classical music, I suppose you could call my four sections 'movements'. If you're really into classical music, I imagine you'd listen to all the movements from a particular symphony in order. I mean it's not as if when you watch a film you just watch 'that cool bit at the beginning' or the 'awesome shootout at the end', well if you do, you really shouldn't. I've made a diagram which may hopefully go some way to making this clearer.
[/tangent]

9. Cult - This was the song which Slayer released before the album and on the really hard to find EPs that only appeared in Hot Topic in America around 06/06/06. (the original date that the album was supposed to be released, good things take time I guess, though this could be the only thing to top God Hates Us All being incidentally released on 9/11 in terms of symbolic irony) This feels like the Christ Illusion equivalent to Bloodline. It's simply the best riff on the album by a mile, you can just see the big grin on Kerry's face when he came up with this one. I've been talking about riffs a lot, and in a very vague way, so I'll throw in some typical music review adjectives to try and sum up this particular riff. Monolithic, Monumental, Epic, Crushing, Majestic. Phew, hopefully I've got that out my system now. Once the song gets going with a tempo change and another new riff Araya launches into some seriously anti-religious lyrics. Kerry King must really hate Christianity, that's something which should really be hammered home on this track. Stand-out lyrics on this song? Where to start, they're probably some of the best on the album, the eponymous "I've made my choice, six six six" which was put on the 06/06/06 t-shirts, which I was fortunate enough to find out about in time as, in true Slayer fashion, only 666 were made. This song also features the album's namesake "I see through your Christ Illusion". The leads are of course awesome throughout and the final "break it down, yo!" moment after around the 4:10 mark nicely brings the song to a close.


10. Supremist. Slayer have traditionally had two types of song to end their albums, as do their thrash contemporaries Megadeth and Metallica (though Slayer will never be accused of being 'betrayers' of heavy metal). End songs are either epics along the lines of Spill The Blood, Raining Blood or Seasons In The Abyss, or superfasterthananythingprevious songs which is the self explanatory category which Supremist belongs to (though Raining Blood really belongs to both sections). Supremist is fast, if that really needs spelling out (it's a Slayer album FFS). The opening riff is really reminiscent of the kind of stuff that was happening on Hell Awaits, kind of old school death metal similar to stuff Possessed do. Supremist really ties the album up (insert gory WHAT THE HELL IS THE WORD I'M LOOKING FOR? SIMILE?) like erm... a tourniquet on a severed limb or something. After a final tempo change, slowing down to some seriously lumbering riffing (I'm getting really tired of that word now) the song fades out with some sustainy feedbacky stuff, a neat effect which nicely book ends the album with the opening fade in.


So in conclusion? Christ Illusion is awesome, it's classic hardcore Slayer with a healthy disrespect for religion. People have called it a mix of Seasons in the Abyss and God Hates Us All, which actually comes pretty close to how I see it too. I feel on this album, Slayer have deliberately tried to go back to classic territory and deliver something which sounds very different to the previous album which seemed more 'groove' oriented (don't ask me what that's supposed to mean, I suppose it's implying a more 'modern' metal sound). Many have cited the return of the always excellent Dave Lombardo to the drums though I believe the classic sound to be due to a more riff oriented song writing, particularly from Kerry King who seems to get more and more pissed off with every Slayer album. Lombardo's drumming really is absolutely fantastic and puts a lot of heavy metal drummers to shame with his flawless playing and focus on actually producing a heavy and cool drum beat. I'm no fan of blast beats or drum triggering etc. For me, Lombardo does the heaviest drums in all metal because he isn't preoccupied with getting in as much double bass as possible or attempting to show off needless fills and pointlessly complex time signatures. Like I said before, this album is 0% bullshit, so none of that drum wankery would be tolerated. I better draw this lengthy review to a close. Score? Come on, it's a 10/10. Just look at all the medals I awarded. This album is awesome.



Extar, over, out.

79. If someone is especialy brutal say "HAIL MOTHERFUCKER"