Kerry King of Slayer performs in Australia in 2009.Getty Images
Heavy is a relative value. The roar Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath coaxed from his Gibson SG in 1970 was mighty for its time, but seems almost quaint when compared to the muscle packed into today's down-tuned power chords. Bands that were heavy-metal heroes in the seventies and early eighties - Blue Oyster Cult, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Motley Crue - are considered classic rock today. Yesterday's outrage inevitably becomes tomorrow's nostalgia.
And then there's Slayer. In the mid-eighties, this California quartet was the most ferocious of thrash metal's founding fathers, and 11 albums later, their music still comes across as a sonic slap in the face. Unlike Metallica, Slayer has never skewed mainstream, blunting its edge for mass consumption, and where Anthrax was happy to make crossover moves like cutting a version of Bring the Noise with rappers Public Enemy, Slayer has stayed stubbornly true to its roots.
As drummer Dave Lombardo puts it, "We wanted to kick ass. That was our attitude, and that was what drove us to be what we are today."
What they are today is one of the most singular presences in popular music, a band whose sound, drive and genius for controversy has remained potent for over a quarter century. Lombardo credits the band's durability to two factors: self-awareness and lots of gigging.
"We don't stray away from what established us," he says. "If you start doing that, it's going to fall apart. Too many changes just isn't good. You've got to stay with the nucleus of what started the band. And the more a band plays together live, the more they'll discover themselves. We've been playing together for a long time, so we connect really well on stage."
There's a similar connectivity between Slayer fans, and as they head out on the Canadian leg of their American Carnage tour, along with long-time thrash rivals Megadeth and Testament, Slayer fandom once again becomes a sort of secret handshake for metalheads.
"Our fans are great," says Lombardo. "They're all proud they're wearing their Slayer T-shirt, just walking down the street, and when a Slayer fan finds another one it's like, 'Hey, you listen to Slayer? All right!' They click."
He laughs. "It's like a Slayer Army."
Although there are always fresh young recruits for that army, Lombardo reports that the band sees quite a few old veterans out on the road. "We got the young kids, and the 20-to-30-year olds. Now we're getting the dads bringing their kids," he says, from a beach in Santa Monica, Calif., where he's watching his daughter frolic in the surf.
Slayer's large and diverse following - which reportedly includes more Mensa members than any band in metal - is also a good argument against the notion that the band has been a pernicious influence on popular culture since the release of Reign in Blood in 1986. That album was to have been the band's major-label debut, but Columbia Records refused to distribute the disc after label chief Walter Yetnikoff took offence to the album-opening Angel of Death, which was about the Nazi medical atrocities of Josef Mengele. (Geffen Records ultimately picked up the album, which went gold.)
Nor did Slayer's brush with controversy end there. The band was twice sued by two California parents who claimed that their daughter's rape and murder in an alleged Satanic ritual had been inspired by Slayer songs. Both suits were dismissed, with the judge in the second case ruling that he did not "consider Slayer's music obscene, indecent or harmful to minors."
Ten years later, the cover art to the 2006 album Christ Illusion was deemed offensive both by the city fathers of Fullerton, Calif., who had album advertisements removed from park benches, and Christian groups in India, who pressured the group's label there into pulling the album from release.
Lombardo finds such fuss ridiculous. "I mean, what are they going to do?," he says. "We're only telling stories. It's not actions - it's music. It's fantasy stuff, just putting thoughts on paper. That's a crime?
"It doesn't bother me," he adds. "If they take my drums away, I guess I just can't play any more. But I don't see that happening, unless I'm living in a communist culture."
One thing he does believe in protecting against, however, is ear damage from the extreme volume Slayer favours. "I do wear earplugs," he says. "I've been wearing them for a few years now."
Lombardo turned to ear protection after having what he describes as "a scare on a tour" that left him worried about hearing loss. "One of the monitor guys just turned things up too loud, and it hurt," he says. "So I went to an ear doctor and got it checked. He said I was fine, but I was like, you know what? I'm going to protect them from now on."
Slayer performs (with Megadeth) at the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto on Thursday and the John Labatt Centre in London, Ont., on Friday.