This album just turned 40 years old last week. Let’s relieve some arthritis, check out senior discounts, and get into it.

Slayer – Show No Mercy

Released December 3, 1983 via Metal Blade Records

My Favorite Tracks – Black Magic, The Final Command, Die By The Sword

This is more than just the story of Slayer’s debut album, it’s also the story of the formation of Slayer. The band did not fiddle about with a ton of members before getting a functioning line-up together – the founders of the band were Tom Araya on vocal and bass, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman on guitars, and Dave Lombardo on drums. The group initially played cover songs, stuff like Maiden and Priest as well as the highly influential Venom. Slayer would incorporate the leather and spikes look as well as Satanic imagery into their performances.

Brian Slagel, the founder of Metal Blade Records, happened upon a Slayer gig and got the group to commit to the third volume of the Metal Massacre compilation series. He also got the band into a recording contract and Slayer set out to get their debut album recorded. Metal Blade did not have financial backing for the album so Araya and King used their own money and borrowed more to get the album done.

This album comprises 10 tracks at a slender 35 minutes of runtime. I am not going to go through every one of them today, instead I’ll just give the tracklist and then go over some highlights.

Evil Has No Boundaries

The Antichrist

Die By The Sword

Fight Till Death

Metal Storm/Face The Slayer

Black Magic

Tormentor

The Final Command

Crionics

Show No Mercy

There are other versions of this album out and about, some have a package that includes the band’s next EP Haunting The Chapel, this is a CD I used to have way back when and kind of wish I still did. There are others that have various bonus tracks.

The sound on this album is one that can be surmised from the bands Slayer were covering in their first days – this is a mix of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, along with a heavy dose of Venom and Mercyful Fate. I’d hesitate to call this thrash, though Slayer are clearly a defining band of that genre. This is a bit of something else, maybe speed metal on Satanic steroids. But it also isn’t really wrong to call it an early thrash banger.

This album is brash and rough, though it does flow and is very listenable. It does not descend into a near parody of heavy metal in the way many might say Venom did. While this wasn’t produced by a mastermind of the studio (Slayer self-produced along with Brian Slagel), it also isn’t crude and unwieldy the way, say, Sodom’s debut stuff was.

The dissonance that would come to define Slayer’s music was already present here, with super fast riffs running along with Tom Araya’s vocals, which for this debut could be found in the higher register. He stayed in his more usual pocket for a lot of stuff but would let out a falsetto scream on many occasions, something in keeping with King Diamond. It’s also something we wouldn’t get much more of as Slayer charted more of a thrash course and Tom decided to preserve his vocal chords for a 26 year long career of belting out some of the most subversive heavy metal to be found.

This album can be reviewed fairly simply, it is an all-or-nothing affair if a person will get into it or not – it’s an early heavy metal album, very heavy, that sets a course for being the truly monstrous stuff that a lot of other acts got accused of being through the 1980’s and the Satanic Panic. The riffs and drumming are lightning fast, if not necessarily constructed in the greatest songwriting fashion. Yet, it all holds together far better than a lot of other examples of “rough” early ’80’s metal that didn’t wind up being massively influential. These songs are “on the rails,” if only just barely, but there is a cohesive unit here.

I will say that I absolutely love this album, it is one of my favorite Slayer records. It is not their defining sound by any means, we’d get that a few years later on Reign In Blood and beyond. But this one has a very nice quality in its rawness, yet still being a functional unit. We can praise Venom all day and night for being the forefathers of the extreme metal that would come, but Slayer and Mercyful Fate were the two early bands that made this sound like actual music.

If there’s a song that hints at the Slayer to come, it’s Die By The Sword. This brutal tale of ancient warfare give the staccato, militant sort of rhythm that Slayer would employ as they went along. It remained a staple of the band’s set throughout their career, being the most-played live song from this album (just ahead of Black Magic). What Slayer was to be was truly found in this grotesque epic.

But that isn’t to discount the rest of the record – personally, I love it all. The Antichrist is a high-pitched attack that goes as fast as it can, while The Final Command builds in pitch through running riffs and Dave Lombardo’s psychotic drumming ability. Tormentor is a tale of night stalking that sees some fantastic early Araya screams, and the closer Show No Mercy is an early showcase of how the NWOBHM influenced the next generation that would be called extreme.

Show No Mercy was the first salvo from what would become a heavy metal icon. It was somewhat immature and not expertly executed, yet it works in its juvenile and unformed charm. The record would do wonders for an early Metal Blade Records, selling over 20,000 when the label had nothing that had hit over 5,000 at the time. And Slayer would be off and running, launching a tour that recruited family members as the road crew.

It would only be a few years before Slayer truly broke through, becoming one of the Big Four of thrash metal on the back of their genre-defining Reign In Blood album. But Show No Mercy should not be overlooked, nor should its follow-up Hell Awaits. This was the true bowels of heavy metal in the early ’80’s. Parents and the wives of politicians might have been upset over what a lot of other bands were doing, but Slayer was on a whole other plane of existence from that.