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Shout out to John Book for reminding me and for his touching post...
Early 87. A young Jakob and his friend Rikard is visiting a two year older skater dude. Jakob and his friend is discussing whether S.O.D.'s "Speak english or Die" is the fastestr album in the world (yeah, I know; we hadn't heard much and it's not much of a topic but hey, we were kids; when I think back on my pre-early teens, this is what 90% of my conversations looked like). The young Jakob had heard-and dug-some thrash:Metallica and Anthrax of course who were both relatively close to "normal" metal, Megadeth's "Peace sells..." video, Exodus "Bounded by blood" (still an alltime favorite) and some other stray albums by bands like Tankard and Onslaught.
Anyway, the skater dude says:''Oh, you think SOD is fast*'' (*in retrospect, there are sections on the SOD album that is faster than anything on ''Reign...'' but I'm talking more about the music as a *whole*) and puts on Slayers then fairly new ''Reign in blood'' and BAM! My life as a music fan changed and for the next four years, I would go more and more ''out'' in terms of speed and extremity while leaving ''regular'' heavy rock behind-Kreator, Dark Angel, Bathory, Possessed, Napalm Death, Death, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Autopsy, Entombed and the list continues until I burnt out and just got tired of distorted guitars and screaming in general and metal in particular and started to look for other music. It was pretty much this era that made me a music nerd beyond the mainstream and also informed my overall musical aesthetics for all eternity even beyond metal.
However, my best memorys of ''Reign...'' has more to do with the mid-90's: Me and another friend used to warm up drinking in his apartment before going out to party and we played all types of shit:Wu-Tang, Parliament, the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Isaac Hayes, Rolling Stones,EPMD-you name it. However, we ALWAYS ended with playing ''Reign...'' loud as fuck and screaming along to all the timeless, retarded one-liner  ecapitated bodies found-on my wall:your HEAD!!!, I have yet only just begun to TAKE YOUR FUCKING LIvES!!! DO YOU WANNA DIE?!!! etc. *That* era is what I think the most of when I hear the record-two former metalheads who had discovered a whole new world of music but yet went back to their roots every other night as some sort of reminder like ''this is where we come from''. Bsically, it's a party-record to me nowadays rather than a celebration of evil which is strange considering the fact that the very first line on the album (besides ''AAAAARGH'') is ''Auschwitz, the meaning of pain, the way that I want you to die''...
Over time, ''Reign...'' has become to extreme metal (no, Metallica doesn't count; they had vocal melodies in their songs-HUGE principal differnce) what ''Kind of blue'' is to jazz or ''Legend'' is to reggae:the type of album that has thousands of ratings on rateyourmusic and hundreds of reviews on amazon and appear on ''regular'' best ever lists where other albums in the same genre/subgenre doesn't come close. Beyond the songs-which are dope of course-I can count four main reasons for this:
1.The timing. When ''Reign'' came out, Slayer was one of only four thrash bands with a major deal/distribution. That meant that the music got heard WAY beyond the fanzine/metal-nerd circles. Between mid-86 and early 87, these four bands-Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer-released the most critically celebrated albums of their respective career (megadeth might be an exception) at a crucial time:when metal had become soft as fuck. Even Judas Priest and Iron Maiden made records with synthesizers, Bon Jovi were HUGE and Def Leppards ''Hysteria'' was on the horizon. These four bands and their records represented a guerrilla-movement of sorts and out of these four, Slayer CLEARLY stands out as the most intense and brutal. Actually, there had never been a record like ''Reign...'' released on a major before and rarely since, ''normal'' people had never heard something like this before and after that, the ''novelty'' wore off. There has been several bands who has made faster, more extreme stuff both before and since but none came close to the impact of Slayer.
2. The producer/label. In 86, Def Jam was known as the flagship label for the music that was easily the most cutting edge of the 80's:Hip-Hop. Rick Rubin was of course the name producer behind the label. By taking Slayer under their wings, Def Jam sort of legitimized extreme metal as a cutting edge thing; I know for a fact that several non-metal reviewers took notice STRICTLY on the basis of the involvement of Rubin and Def jam.
Basically, Slayer got a certain ''hipster'' cache due to the Def Jam thing that somewhat remains to this day:if Metallica's ''Master of puppets'' is the thrash-album most likely to show up in lists by magazines like Rolling Stone, ''Reign...'' is the equivalent in ''cooler'' circles and lists, those that are more underground, cutting-edge and ''indie''.
3.Rubin's production and the performance of the band. Most major extreme metal had production drenched in reverb and various 80s effects, alternatively, they sounded noisy and messy; Rick Rubin on the other hand gave the album a dry, almost ACDC-esque sound that sounds far more timeless and ''classic rock'' than practically anything else in the genre in the 80's (I wish the bass was louder though), really, it sounds fabulous even if it's not MY ideal metal-sound.
Meanwhile, Slayer played with a clockwork precision and accuracy which was vERY important for the bands acceptance in more mainstream metal-circles who had previously dismissed bands along the same lines as Slayer as untalented losers who hid behind an ''evil'', satanic image and ridiculous speed to make up for lack of talent; with Slayer, they couldn't really make that claim anymore when they ahd the clear production to back them up. The mainstream metal-critics might not have liked or understood the music but they had to respect it. By comparison, a stylistically similar band like Dark Angel had top-notch musicianship at the time but the noisy, ''wall of sound'' production on their album ''Darkness Descends'' meant that noone outside of extreme metal circles could enjoy it (of course, it was also released on an indie but that was my previous point). Bands like Kreator on the other hand were still vERY messy and chaotic, too much so for ''normal'' people...
4.The song-structures. This is perhaps the msot important aspect. Slayer and Rubin took a reductionist approach, cutting down on repetition of individual sections and making almost every song short and compact which stood in sharp contrast to the other big thrash-bands at the time. Thrash had a tendency to be somewhat proggy with long intros and mid-sections and convoluted structures. The songs on ''Reign...'' doesn't really contain fewer riffs than your typical Metallica-song at the time *but* they are structured for maximum impact with sections only appearing once (see the genius stroke of skipping the pre-chorus between the second verse and chorus in ''Angel of Death'' and then later have the song going immediately into the chorus after the solos-not something Metallica (or Dark Angel for that matter) would have done at that stage).
basically, it's a 100% pure thrash album but played witht he attitude of hardcore punk which makes it very accessible by comparison.
Anyway, fabulous record-total classic IMO.
Oh yeah, this record cound NEVER have been done in the 60's, 70's or even early 80's-can you say that about most cool indie-rock? Just something worth pondering...
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