God Hates Us All

With the success of Slipknot’s latest proving that the most extreme music can occupy a place, however fleeting, in the mainstream charts, there probably hasn’t been a better moment in Slayer’s twenty-year career for them to release an album such as God Hates Us All. It’s all very old school metal for sure, with its grinding riffs, growling vocals and pummelling drums, but there’s an intensity about the record that is hard to ignore.

Rather incongruously recorded at Bryan Adams’ studio in Vancouver, producers Matt Hyde and Rick Rubin (adding to his recent CV of Macy Gray and Johnny Cash!) have helped bring out the best in the band, the resulting aural assault belying their advancing years. Little has changed since the good old days of thrash metal (there’s no Metallica style reinvention here), with the frantic ‘God Send Death’, ‘Cast Down’ and ‘Exile’ all exhibiting skull crushing force.

Lyrically, they’re still dabbling in rather ridiculous notions of the occult and a general theme of anti-religion (you’d never have guessed from the title would you?) but somehow lines like “strive for peace with acts of war” and “global chaos feeding on hysteria” seem to have an extra resonance as we head deeper into the twenty first century. As with their boiler suit wearing successors, you either get Slayer or you don’t – but if you fall into the later category, God Hates Us All will do very nicely.