Review Summary: Slayer decides to change absolutely nothing, which results in their weakest album of the decade.
Slayer, along with most other thrash metal titans, were not known for reinventing their sound. Granted, they added some hints of melody and their songwriting became slightly more mature after the release of
Reign In Blood, but their sound is still instantly recognizable. They still rely on insanely fast, tremolo-picked riffs, and shouted vocals with unsubtle lyrics about Satan, blood, and the evils of religion. Their solos still consist of mindless running up and down the fretboard, with some abuse of the whammy bar added in. However, throughout their long career, Slayer managed to change their music just enough to keep it interesting. Their most recent album,
World Painted Blood represents Slayer stagnating and becoming cheap imitations of themselves.
World Painted Blood’s sound is not hard to describe. In fact, if one were to mix every single negative generalization made about thrash metal, they would get this album.
World Painted Blood is filled with riffs containing two or three notes tremolo-picked over and over, few, if any, memorable melodies, and lyrics resembling the writing of a six-grader obsessed with violence. The biggest fault, however, is not the amount of poorly written material, but rather the amount of unoriginal material. Most of the riffs are uninteresting not because they’re bad, but because Slayer already has five identical ones in their back catalog. The only difference is that on
World Painted Blood, the performance is slightly worse than on past albums.
Kerry King's and Jeff Hanneman's playing remains largely unchanged from previous albums. They still play with incredible technicality (and nearly no emotion), but, for some reason, their guitar tone sounds pathetic on parts of
World Painted Blood. This is most noticeable in the song
Snuff where their guitars sound weak and fuzzy, but, for the most part, the guitar playing is above average. Dave Lombardo, one of the best drummers in the genre, is almost flawless on here, which is best shown on the otherwise uninteresting
Public Display of Dismemberment. Araya’s bass playing is very rarely heard, and is not very fascinating when audible, but the real weakness of
World Painted Blood is in the vocals. Slayer was never praised for superb vocal performance, but this is terrible. Araya has a new habit of screaming and then rapidly raising the pitch, which should sound cool, but instead is reminiscent a toad. The vocals are mainly one note screamed over and over, which is rather dull. At parts, such as
Human Strain, his singing is interesting, but these instances are rare, and in some songs, the entire band performs well, but these instances are even rarer.
Were this any band except for Slayer, this record would have been absolutely disastrous. The one saving grace of this album is the energy with which the band plays. Sure, the music has been played countless times already, the performance may be a bit worse than expected, but the energy almost makes up for this at times.
Beauty Through Order contains some of the bands most mediocre songwriting, and some of their worst lyrics (this is an achievement), but the energy, particularly Araya’s, makes the song somewhat tolerable.
All in all,
World Painted Blood is not a strong release. Slayer can still write strong material, as they proved on
Christ Illusion, it’s just that they don’t do so on
World Painted Blood.
