Slayer - Diabolus in Musica


I thought yesterday was bad, but today was a straight up dumpster fire. Let's just go straight to the hard stuff, here's Slayer's 1998 opus tritonus, Diabolus in Musica.

Depending on who you're talking to it's either the best Slayer album since sliced bread, the most expirimental Slayer album, or the first of a string of unenjoyable Nü-Metal (send all umlaut related hate mail to Blue Öyster Cult) indulgences. Yeah, i'm as confused as you, it sounds unremarkably like a 1998 Slayer album produced by Rick Rubin. Never once, not for even a second, did Slayer ever even lurk in the parking lot of Mainstream. They knew they were scary, they knew Metallica was an extremely effective gateway drug, they....

We'll listen to their 3rd supposed Nu-Metal album at some point, but if you're a long time reader, you'll know i have a complete lactose intolerance for calling things that don't have turntable scratches and/or rap verses Nu-Metal, regardless of how the guitars are tuned. This just sounds like Slayer using 'spensive recording equipment for a change.

Track 7, Desire, that stands out as a weird one. You could argue the verses have an almost Deftones whiny flavor, but as for the overall song i counterargue Seasons In The Abyss. It's all just Slayer. If anything, like i just have to find something to criticize, the guitar solos sadly sound like they appear in the songs they were actually written for. Usually Jeff and Kerry sound like they were secretly recorded playing a game of "bet you can't do this" a week before the song was even written, but some of these solos  sound suspiciously like they practiced them several times with a metronome.

One thing critics love to do, for lack of anything more coherent to talk about, is alternatingly love/hate the ins and outs of drummers Lombardo and Bostaph; don't let the door hit you on the way out...yay Lombardo's back...that was fun but bring back Bostaph, that kind of thing. Portnoy's back in Dream Theater now, let me check and see if i care...sometimes, as in the case of Slayer and Dream Theater (one of which i like very much), i can totally believe the Transitive Theory of Lineup Changes has some merit.

Lyrically, only becuse it will come up when we listen to Christ Illusion some time in the future, this is just a Slayer album. It's mostly incomplete sentences, edge-lordy type "make polite society squirm" stuff, because Slayer (in case you didn't know) like to collectively write songs from the perspective of the bad guy. You might even say they like to play devil's advocate. Again, the future holds a mid 00s complete cultural shift into Post-Irony, where everyone decides everything is now literal with complete disregard for how insane that is, but this is an album from 1998 and Tom Araya yell-sings on it. Odd as it may seem, i do not find this agitating, exciting, or heart-rate elevating. Quite the opposite, this calms me right down and melts away whatever stress i already forgot about after 5 seconds. Your milage may vary.

P.S. Please forgive my taking the booklet out of the case for the photo. It is a used album from 1998, so the jewell case is all scratched up and covered with 666 stickers' worth of glue residue, 'cause corporate retailers sure loved putting all sorts of crap all over an otherwise not at all unsettling album cover.

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