Seasons in the Abyss
’Tis the season, right? Wrong! Call me a Grinch, but I hate Christmas. I have a huge family, and buying gifts for them stretches my budget. I hate giving gift cards, because it strikes me as lazy and disinterested. Just keeping track of my young cousins’ changing interests pushes my memory to the redline, and that excludes all my siblings, grandparents, and so forth. For me, Christmas time is therefore the season in the abyss. Seasons in the Abyss is also Slayer’s last good album, a melding of South of Heaven’s groove and heft with Reign in Blood’s aggression and velocity. Not only that, but I believe the song “Seasons in the Abyss” is the last great, classic song Slayer ever recorded. I’ve never heard anybody praise it to the extent it deserves, so let’s take a closer look.
To understand how much I love “Seasons”, I hold it up along with “Raining Blood”, “Angel of Death”, and “Mandatory Suicide” as the best tracks of Slayer’s career. Between Show No Mercy and Seasons in the Abyss, Slayer were consistently great, but would occasionally erupt with a heavy metal classic. The eruptions were the songs I would throw on a best-of-thrash mixtape or playlist, rather than something like “Kill Again”, “Spirit in Black”, or the middle portions of Reign in Blood.
Much like “Raining Blood”, “Seasons” starts off by establishing imminence. Hanneman and King strike bold chords and hold the notes, punctuating with slow bends and a sickly little guitar line, followed, eventually, by clean, ringing arpeggios. There’s a huge difference, though, between the two songs. “Raining Blood” starts with thunder and then dives into tri-tones and speed. “Raining Blood” is the killer snatching the victim at the front door, the quick slash across the throat. It’s posthumous horror following the violence. “Seasons” is the slow and terrifying death. It’s the stalker lurking in the shadows, peering through the windows. It’s horror before and during the violence, the drawn-out torture in a basement with death as the only relief. If we choose between the two songs, we choose only our method of dying. Either way, we feel death’s proximity.
At 1:43, the tempo picks up and we slide slowly into the abyss. The open chords are replaced with a quick palm-muted line, a slow ascension with a pair of quick descents, two chords that are rapidly stifled. This repeats until about 2:08, when we get the main riff and a juddering little Lombardo part, not quite a fill. The lyrics also come in at this point. Araya delivers the verses with a manic tone. He’s nearly gleeful. The choruses use dual-tracked vocals. One track is Araya in a flat, deadpan manner, a recitation rather than singing. The other track, mixed quietly and behind the flat delivery, is the same manic singing as in the verses. The contrast is striking. The verses are personal in both tone and words. They seem to recount violence. The chorus lyrics are personal, but the flat tone renders them impersonal, an observation. But what is being observed?
Is the track about a murderer? I believe so. The opening lyrics suggest so: “Anticipation, the stimulation… to kill the exhilaration… “ Later verses also suggest a murderer: “Innate seed / to watch you bleed / a demanding physical need” and “Inert flesh / a bloody tomb / A decorated splatter brightens the room / An execution, a sadist ritual…” But then the chorus suggests insanity, descent into madness, the mental abyss. “Close your eyes / look deep into your soul / step outside yourself, and let your thoughts drain… as you go insane, go insane!” The very last vocal line also suggests madness: “Mad intervals of mind residuals”. If a healthy mind is sane and rational, perhaps the killer’s last remnants of logic are being used to conduct the killings and tortures as he or she jumps between rationality and incoherence. Is the killer observing him or herself in the chorus, or observing the victim’s loss of sanity under duress?
The verses are also delivered with open, ringing chords. They torture us, denying resolution. At 3:06 we get another pulsing Lombardo part, but then at 3:10, we hear a true fill, and my favorite piece of Lombardo’s playing. Lombardo works the bottom end of the kit hard, punctuating with just three snare hits. It’s the only element of finality and resolution in the whole song, but we do hear it multiple times. It’s Lombardo dropping the hammer and dropping it hard, but it still has his trademark groove. The whole track is a triumph for Lombardo, a career highlight. He’s the best drummer thrash ever had, but he’s a great drummer playing thrash, not just a thrash drummer. Even if you don’t agree with that, he’s certainly got the most groove, and nowhere is that groove more prominent than on “Seasons in the Abyss”.
At 3:51 the song transitions, a classic lead-in to some soloing. Lombardo drops the hammer four more times, and then, at 4:02, we get finally get our guitar solo. It starts with sickly, queasy vibrato, then a descent down the neck, a partial ascent, and additional unhealthy vibrato. This is my favorite Slayer lead ever. There’s a skittering quality to the way the strings are struck, an odd percussive effect that they never used before or subsequently. There are tradeoffs until 4:52 and we get the final verse, perhaps the victim’s fate, and Lombardo drops the hammer one last time.
As befitting the song’s tone of imminence and impending doom, it never really ends. It slowly fades to the same open, ringing chords and creepy undistorted arpeggios from the very beginning. Listen closely and you can hear Slayer’s ability to cut studio classics fading out as well. There’s a final open chord at 6:00… until there isn’t. At 6:12, there is a final pair of soft strums, and then the guitars die down into feedback. The victim bleeds out, the killer’s mind drains away. We all fall into the abyss.
A feeling of looming dread comes over me on November 25 each year, a black dog that I can never shake. I want to step outside myself, let my thoughts drain, and then go insane. Instead, as I’m trying to remember whether my little brother likes Pokémon or Digimon, or whatever the trendy toy is in a particular year, I use “Seasons in the Abyss” to vent. The flat, disaffected choruses? That’s me, my mind draining away, staring vacantly at Amazon.com for another hour. The angry, disturbing verses? That’s Black Friday, me dodging a minivan in a parking lot ,or frantically wrapping at 2am. It’s my wallet screaming for mercy. And the song’s slow fadeout? That’s how Christmas ends for me: there’s a final gift giving on the 25th. Until the cycle starts all over again, exactly one year later.
. . .
