I am in a musical mood today and Jimmy Fallon having Slayer performing Raining Blood on the Tonight Show kind of frazzled my mind a bit.

It is time. It is time to talk about the Slayer album Reign In Blood. It is considered by some to be one of the best metal albums ever produced. With very good reason as far as I am concerned...

I discovered Reign In Blood when it first came out. I remember in 1986/87 or so going to a local Alco (like a walmart/kmart) and being in a particularly rebellious mood. I walked out of the store packing Slayer's Reign In Blood, and Hell Awaits having never heard them before. I often bought music I'd never heard. That was one of my things. I also bought Grim Reaper's Rock You To Hell at the time. As you can see there was a theme, and I was in a mood. Let's call it rebellion. I often got persecuted by religious zealots due to listening to metal. Yet, until that moment I'd not say I was purposefully giving them the middle finger. On this day I was doing exactly that.

Now out of these Reign In Blood blows the others out of the water. It is something special and unique even unto this day.

I will say at first listen I felt a little let down. Why? Well we were still playing audio cassettes back then. You'd fit half the songs on one side of the cassette, and you would fit the other half of the songs on the other side. You flipped the tape over to listen to the other side when you were done with one side. If you wanted to relisten to the side you just heard you had to rewind the tape and that could take a minute or two. I bet many of you have never experienced this.

Well Reign In Blood when it flipped over was the same songs. They fit the entire album onto one side, and when it flipped over it was the same songs again. Was I being scammed? Did I get shorted music? In reality, no. There were just as many songs.

They were just incredibly fast. Many of the songs they performed in what is known as double or even triple time. They packed more crazy musicianship into a single side of a cassette than most bands did the entire album back then. It is three decades later and the album is STILL a master piece.

I wanted to give you my introduction to this piece and now if you don't mind I'd like to share this album with you. Oh, an the first song is about the Holocaust and there are some huge Jewish fans of Slayer because of this song. It is called Angel of Death, but it is not about Satan or any of that crap.

In fact, let's go ahead and get the Satanism crap out of the way. Tom Araya (Vocalist originally from Chile) is actually a Catholic and a great father. These guys are huge horror movie, and horror book fans. That is the type of songs they write. While many of their songs will deal with such topics, to them it is a story. It is like watching or writing a horror novel or movie. It does not make them satanic. With that said, yes, there are some fans of theirs that are Satanic. That's their stupidity and the band didn't force them to make that choice.

They also greatly improved my vocabulary when I was in high school as they used some not so common words in their lyrics.

Angel of Death - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman, Music: Jeff Hanneman - has probably the most iconic vocal scream in music history

One thing I quickly came to really love Slayer for was the amazing riffs they could come up which were interesting and haunting at the same time. That is one of the hallmarks of Slayer.

Oh and though I've only seen them live on DVD, I've known many friends that have seen them. They can be one of the most intense concert going experiences there from a purely sonic and crowd point of view. I always wanted to see them live, but now that I am older I am content to live vicariously through videos.

Piece by Piece - Lyrics: Kerry King, Music: Kerry King

Necrophobic - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King

Altar of Sacrifice - Lyrics: Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman

Jesus Saves - Lyrics: Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King

Criminally Insane - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King

Reborn - Lyrics: Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman

Epidemic - Lyrics: Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King

Postmortem - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman, Music: Jeff Hanneman (The first Slayer song I learned to play on guitar)

Raining Blood - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman

Aggressive Perfector - Lyrics: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Music: Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King (this was on the 1998 re-issue as a bonus track so this was not in the initial mix that addicted me)