Style: hard rock
Label: Capitol
Year: 2011
Home: Las Vegas, Nevada
Members: Mark Slaughter ~ vocals/guitar/keyboards
Tim Kelly ~ guitar/b. vocals
Dana Strum ~ bass/b. vocals
Blas Elias ~ drums/b. vocals
For those that do want to dip into the top 80's hair metal bands you're going to eventually come across Slaughter. They sold plenty out the door & made a few bubbles in the pool before the grunge & alt rock explosion landed on them. Though, their hits haven't necessarily ridden out the era well, as outside frontman Mark Slaughter's nasal shout there's really very little distinctive about them. Of course, fans of the band will criticize me for saying that they're not the greatest most special thing, but they really do sound like cliched 80's hair metal, particularly decades later. Tons of their peers did it better, & many who didn't have survived via reunions where they've actually finally churned out something interesting. The band still performs, but hasn't made an album since 1999, the year guitarist Tim Kelly died, so if they have put some personality into the music most of us aren't privy to it. Slaughter turns in some good old fashioned hair metal, end of story. If you want to check them out go not for their individual albums but this greatest hits package. It's a budget release, no question about it, but its a rarity for a budget release as it actually does present the best of the band.
Mass Slaughter: The Best Of Slaughter has the complete career overview, but for an introduction this is all you're ever going to need. It is missing some certified chart-toppers, replaced by non-chart-toppers (i.e. "Shake This Place", "She Wants More", "Loaded Gun", "Eye To Eye"), which is strange considering all five of their albums between 1990 to 2000 actually spawned decent ranking chart hits ... not even David Lee Roth has that success rate. While there's nothing from their final release
Back To Reality with Jeff Blando on guitar. But, there's also a second & more important reason to get this compilation over a studio album. Slaughter had two major hits their career became built on, "Up All Night", "Fly To The Angels", but the best song by a longshot is "Days Gone By" from the later days that one is liable to miss getting a studio album or two. Missing this song is missing out on Slaughter at their creative best, as its a nearly operatic power ballad & it makes everything else sound like the band was following record label commandments instead of trying to do something that has memorability. But, the question is are you going to listen to Slaughter a lot or want to pursue them further into the studio albums? At the time this music was all the rage, but now they just sound so dated and of the time that its hard to imagine that they sold as much as they did. Their music is as play by the numbers as perfect as you can get ... I mean, the next step is to actually just play Bon Jovi covers.
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