It was the only Slayer album ever written with a specific game plan in mind Video of SLAYER - Mandatory Suicide Live 88ġ. In honor of the record's enduring brilliance, here are nine things you might not know about South of Heaven. 4 on Revolver's fan poll of the all-time greatest Slayer songs. Decades on, South of Heaven is now rightly considered to be one of Slayer's finest albums, and its title track recently came in at No. 57 on the Billboard 200 album chart, it gave the band their best chart showing to date. Rather than further painting themselves into a hard/fast corner, the record effectively served notice that Slayer were growing as musicians and songwriters, and when the record peaked at No. Though some Slayer fans were disappointed by the change in musical approach, South of Heaven turned out to be an artistic and commercial success. We just kind of mellowed out a little bit - not mellow, but slowed down." That's why we did South of Heaven and Seasons. "We're not going to be able to beat that. "It was just like, we're not going to be able to top that whole album," guitarist Jeff Hanneman told Revolver. Rather than trying to duplicate Reign in Blood, the band wisely chose to demonstrate that they could be just as fearsome at a slower rate of speed. Bassist/vocalist Tom Araya was actually singing for the first time, and the closing "Spill the Blood" - another doomy groover - even featured clean guitar tones in its intro. Sure, there were still plenty of rapid-fire riffs to be heard on the likes of "Silent Scream," "Ghosts of War" and "Cleanse the Soul," but the album-opening title track was practically Sabbathesque in its doomy plod, while cuts like "Behind the Crooked Cross," "Mandatory Suicide" and "Read Between the Lies" were all built upon swinging mid-tempo grooves. Instead of brief bursts of full-on brutality, the Rick Rubin-produced South of Heaven took a left turn into slower, more dynamic territory. Released on July 5th, 1988, Slayer's fourth full-length came as something of a shock to those who were expecting the pioneering SoCal thrash quartet to pick up exactly where the rampaging assault of 1986's Reign in Blood had left off. But none of these mighty thrash offerings were as surprising - or as controversial - as Slayer's South of Heaven. A banner year for American thrash metal, 1988 gave us such classics as Metallica's …And Justice for All, Megadeth's So Far, So Good… So What, Anthrax's State of Euphoria, Testament's The New Order, Death Angel's Frolic Through the Park, Vio-Lence's Eternal Nightmare, Flotsam and Jetsam's No Place for Disgrace, and Nuclear Assault's Survive.
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