I’ve been a Slayer fan for nearly 30 years now, and as a guitar player Kerry King has been one of my heroes since I was a teenager, so I went into this with high hopes.

I’m sure you’ve all heard some reviews already calling the whole project “Slayer Lite” and I can’t completely disagree with that, but I really feel it’s not entirely fair, and I will clarify that as I go through the good, the bad, and the “meh” of this album.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. This is mostly just a Slayer album. As much as I love Slayer I was really hoping for something more from this solo outing. The part that really kind of irritates me the most is that it’s not even a cohesive Slayer album. Some tracks sound like modern Slayer, some like 90s Slayer when they flirted with nu metal, and my favorites sounded like classic 80s thrash era.

What we’ve ended up with sounds more like a collection of Slayer B-sides and unreleased tracks that goes on a little longer than it probably should. While they are all definitely good songs, there’s really not much here I haven’t heard before. The guitars sound like Slayer, the drums sound like Slayer, the bass sounds like Slayer, even the singer sounds like Tom Araya with a sore throat.

Wow, I really used the word “Slayer” a lot there…

That’s really it for anything negative I can say about it, so let’s move on to the positive!

There are a number of tracks on here where you can actually hear Kerry King very tentatively trying to step out of his comfort zone a little, and that kept me engaged enough to listen to the whole thing. Mostly these were little things that I think would have been vetoed on a regular Slayer release. There are some neoclassical riffs, a couple of tracks lean a little more punk which I really liked, I think I even heard a little blues lick here and there!

I wouldn’t call any track on here bad! I enjoyed all of them individually even if they don’t necessarily add up to something that sounds like an “album” as a whole! If you were really wanting more Slayer after the last album you won’t be disappointed!

My final conclusion is that this is an album written by a man who has played the same type of music with the same band for 40+ years, and is not yet really sure how to branch out on his own. If he makes another one, and I hope he does, I’d like to hear him go completely off the deep end and play something totally unexpected that he always wanted to do but couldn’t because it didn’t sound “Slayer” enough.

My final grade is 3 inverted crucifixes out of 5

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