So the new Slayer album, World Painted Blood, was produced by Greg Fidelman (with Rick Rubin as executive producer). Fidelman engineered and mixed Metallica’s Death Magnetic album last year and notoriously screwed it up quite severely. Now he’s been let loose on the latest CD by another classic thrash band, so I was intrigued to hear what it sounds like.
At first listen, it’s immediately obvious that this isn’t nearly as badly distorted as Death Magnetic. More careful examination, however, reveals that it’s still not a very dynamic-sounding record. Analysing it using vorbisgain gives a suggested AlbumGain of -12.13dB, making it one of the loudest albums I’ve come across (I think only Death Magnetic and Iggy Pop’s remix of Raw Power were worse). And listening with headphones, there is definitely some clipping going on.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that it matters quite so much. The distortion is audible, but it doesn’t completely smother the recording like it did on Death Magnetic. Instead it just sort of adds an extra harshness to the overall sound which doesn’t sound entirely inappropriate to the music.
Aside from the excessive compression, the production isn’t bad. The bass is a little bit quieter in the mix than I’d have liked, but otherwise it’s pretty good. On the other hand, listening first to World Painted Blood, and then to a couple of other recent thrash albums: Testament’s The Formation of Damnation and Exodus’s The Atrocity Exhibition…Exhibit A (both engineered and mixed by Andy Sneap), I can’t help but feel that both of those records sound noticeably better. I’m not sure to what extent that’s due to the fact they aren’t quite so badly clipped and over-compressed, though.
So I guess overall the production scrapes a pass, but just barely.
Although this post was mostly about the album’s production, I think I probably should express some opinion on the music itself, too. It’s pretty good. A lot of people have been saying this is the best thing Slayer have done since Seasons in the Abyss, but I can’t really comment on whether that’s true, since the only other album of theirs that I’ve listened to very much is Reign in Blood. It’s definitely good, though, and noticeably better than what I heard of their last album, Christ Illusion, which I wasn’t that keen on. It isn’t a marked departure from much of what they’ve done before; it’s still unmistakeably a Slayer album, but that doesn’t mean that it sounds stagnant or stale. There are still some new ideas and even when it’s covering familiar ground it does so pretty well.
And judging by Unit 731, apparently Jeff Hanneman has run out of Nazi atrocities to write about, and has been forced to move on to the Japanese.