Raining Blood

The opening is pure theater — rain, wind, the ambient sound of some kind of storm — and then the guitar riff arrives like a building falling sideways. What Slayer did with this track is architecturally sophisticated under all the speed: that descending main riff has a logic to it, a harmonic inevitability that makes it feel less like it was written and more like it was discovered, as though it had always existed and Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman simply located it. The tempo is a controlled sprint — not the frenetic abandon of pure chaos but something more deliberate, each beat placed with precision even at speeds that seem to preclude precision. Tom Araya's bass guitar holds the bottom register together with a thickness that gives the drums somewhere to land, and Dave Lombardo's drumming is clinical in the best sense: no wasted motion, every hit serving the machine. The subject matter is apocalyptic, operatic in its imagery — fallen angels, blood-soaked skies, the end of things — and the production by Rick Rubin strips everything back so that the sheer sonic mass of the band is the only production value. There is almost no reverb, no sweetening, no distance between listener and sound; it's confrontational in its immediacy. The song ends the way storms end — not gently but abruptly — and the silence it leaves behind feels slightly altered, as though the air has changed pressure. Best experienced at full volume, alone, when you want music that takes no interest in your comfort.