It seems that in the last few years, some of the more ‘classic’ bands, especially in metal or hard rock, 
have revisited their roots, and Slayer are no different. In a time when these old stalwarts of the thrash metal scene are regarded as dinosaurs, and they should be trying something new to expand on the genre, maybe even redefine it; unfortunately they revert to something that could be construed as their ‘early-style’, either through melody or composition. The inherent problem with this, of course, is that they could never achieve their classic sound; they’ve already taken things too far. They’re rich, they sell hundreds-of-thousands of albums every year, they don’t have the anger in them anymore, and if they do, they take it out in some overly expensive way (probably). Even if they didn’t sell tons of records or live in enormous houses, to revert to their early style would be completely out of context these days, if only through over-production.
World Painted Blood, Slayer’s grammatically infuriating eleventh LP is exactly what you’d expect from a thrash band in their forties, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Opening with the title track’s extended intro, the suspense and pace of the album are brought into the fray – all the hallmarks of the genre the band helped to create are present and correct. The pace is fairly varied between tracks, and the first half of “Beauty Through Order” gives you some respite from the pummelling the previous three songs dish out. Especially brutal is the powerful “Psychopathy Red”, or the mid-tempo, heavy “Americon”, Tom Araya yelling “It’s all about the mother fucking oil”, a line which, unfortunately, is as trite as it is uninteresting.
Despite that Slayer differ somewhat from most of their peers simply because they could be considered parodists to a degree, they still fall out of perspective by today’s standards. The musicianship is as tight as it has ever been, and I have to hand it to them – even the dry and sharp production techniques of Greg Fidelman imbue a certain sense of the sensibilities of yesteryear, and the unusual technique of pushing the drums to the top of the mix works in its own strange way. Although World Painted Blood is a marked improvement over 2006’s Christ Illusion, the latter wallowing in the limbo of fresh and stale ideas, there still lingers a sense that their ideas are tame, offering little that is new.
My rating? 5 out of 10.
World Painted Blood is out now on American Recordings.
