A lot more new music purchases to get to, but I needed a bit of a breather. So I go back to the time of my childhood, but I’ll be honest: I definitely wasn’t listening to Slayer at 10 years old, cool as that would be. I remember the burnouts in high school with the logo emblazoned on their jackets, but my black Members Only jacket had a small Stryper logo at the time (I would eventually upgrade to acid washed denim with a Halloween back patch). It took another few years and the band’s incredible live album before I became a fan, and a few decades after that before I dug into Show No Mercy, their 1983 debut. Fast and loose and gleefully evil in a way their followups would veer sharply from, it’s a bubbly blast that shows hints of the beast they would become.

It’s still the least listened to and the album I’m least familiar with out of the ones I listen to (basically Show No Mercy thru Decade of Aggression, with a brief detour to World Painted Blood), but I think that’s more time and habit than anything else. When you come out of the gate with “Evil Has No Boundaries”, “The Antichrist”, and “Die By The Sword” there’s no way not to be blown away the energy Ararya, King, Hanneman and Lombardo bring to this burgeoning genre at the time. Despite the relatively thin production, Tom Araya’s bass is actually discernible, and his scream that opens “Evil Has No Boundaries” is already at God-Level. I do prefer the thicker, more angry attack on Decade of Aggression: Live, but that might be familiarity more than anything else: it was technically the first Slayer album I ever bought.

I love the instrumental turn Slayer take on “Metal Storm/Face the Slayer” and the way they segue into the second half’s vocal section. And in “Black Magic” we get our first real taste of where the band would go next on the Haunting The Chapel EP. Dave Lombardo, not yet using double kicks, still shows his innate ability to be a perfect timekeeper without sounding mechanical; he always sounds on the edge of chaos but never tips over the edge. And surprisingly the solos from Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman are tuneful. We haven’t arrived at the chromatic runs that collide into a mess that would come later, and hearing them across Show No Mercy have even a modicum of restrained is always a surprise.

The second half of the album contains more than its share of surprises, with “The Final Command” getting downright groggy (for 80s thrash) with a bridge section that modulates all over the place and kitchen sinks its riffs together in a way that shouldn’t work but does, and “Crionics” grabs some of that NWOBHM gallop in its attack. I don’t know if Show No Mercy will get more attention in my Slayer rotation, but this distraction really helped bring the album to me, if that makes sense.

It doesn’t, but I have to go to work so we’ll leave it there.