Slayer’s fifth studio album welds the blinding tempos of their earliest music to the pure heaviness of 1988’s South of Heaven, augmenting the thrashers’ Satanist obsessions with more earth-bound evil, like urban violence (“Expendable Youth”) and Ed Gein’s murderous grave-robbing (“Dead Skin Mask,” with its spooky spoken intro). The almost Metallica-esque title epic builds up from funereal Black Sabbath doom, but the machine-gunned blitzkrieg “War Ensemble” was immediately embraced by Desert Storm soldiers, who took its “not a drill” warning to heart.