Slayer - Criminally Insane || Collaboration with Shawn Priest (Arsis)
9Well, it only took 17 years of being friends with Shawn and being roommates for the past six months, but we FINALLY produced something together, lol.
We were just randomly talking one night a month ago about a drum pattern to a Cryptopsy song (can't remember which one specifically) and it made me think about how it was essentially the polar opposite of the opening to Criminally Insane... then we just decided we'd cover the latter for fun. We also enlisted the help from our buddy Nick to lay down the bass and vocals, so this is 100% self-produced; no audio from the actual album was used.
As for our version here, it's played slightly faster (maybe 10-12 BPM) and I decided that for the leads, I didn't want to just rip the same ones from the album. Instead, I wrote my own and tried to include more melody to it while also retaining some of that Slayer discordance as well. I think it turned out okay, especially for what was essentially a spur-of-the-moment idea. Obviously, Shawn took a little creative liberty as well, but I think it makes everything that much better; his parts are certainly more interesting than Dave's original recording. Sorry, Dave 🤣
Additional credit goes to Shawn for the actual production of the video itself as well as the audio from all of our recordings. I'll link his channel below; please go do all the YouTube things on his channel, including subscribing to him!
Hope you enjoy!
/ @shawnpriest