In horror-film and fiction circles, stories that drip with viscera and gore are characterized as "wet." And wet's the word for Divine Intervention, Slayer's first new album since 1990. These guys follow their own timetable, and despite their august position as one of the four pillars of thrash metal – along with Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax – they haven't softened their abrasive attack or sweetened their grim and gruesome messages one iota. If Slayer are going to win a broader audience, as Metallica and Megadeth have, it's going to come wholly on the band's own terms.
Slayer are casually referred to as a Satanist band by certain segments of the media; best
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leave that argument to theologians. What the band is doing on
Intervention is most reminiscent of splatter-punk works like John Shirley's genre-defining novel
Wetbones, which uses the tropes of horror as both a set of symbols for dealing with violent, irrational reality and a vocabulary for voicing highly personal reactions such as anger, grief and rage. Like Shirley, Slayer aren't content to show you the carnage from afar – they want you to feel the horror of the Killer Inside. Thus the wetness: The psycho who recounts his unspeakable exploits in Slayer's "213" sweats and salivates, his skin crawls "with orgasmic speed," all while he's "absorbingly masticating a part of you." And in Slayer's world, God is just another psycho. Like the Old Testament-style God of Wrath who cuts a bloody swath through Manhattan in Larry Cohen's horror classic
God Told Me To, the Supreme Deity encountered in "Divine Intervention" is "deathless torture/Void with no mercy."
Musically, Divine Intervention is spectacular. It careers along at impossible tempos, shifting from all-out hardcore ranting to percussive, dissonant riffcraft, often in a single tune. When there's an actual vocal melody, as in the atmospheric "Serenity in Murder," and when the tissues of guitar distortion and harmonic sustain part briefly to reveal a rib cage of lapidary steel-stringed acoustics beneath the flesh, the contrast with the rest of the album's ripping intensity is devastating. Guitarist Kerry King, perhaps the most distinctive guitar soloist in his chosen idiom, makes the instrument howl like the damned in his blitzkrieg feature spots and meshes with fellow guitarist Jeff Hanneman in a great, bracing clamor of sharply etched riffing, while bassist Tom Araya (also the group's hoarsely compelling vocalist) and drummer Paul Bostaph hammer the shifting metric and accent patterns with brutal finesse. Whatever else you may say about 'em, Slayer are one hell of a rock & roll band. (RS 701)
ROBERT PALMER
