Tom Araya

Tom Araya in 2012

Tomás "Tom" Enrique Araya Díaz (born June 6, 1961 in Viña del Mar , Chile ) is a Chilean-American musician . He is the bass player , singer and co- songwriter of the thrash metal band Slayer .

Life

His parents moved their son and six siblings from Chile to Los Angeles in 1965 because his father wanted to look for work there. They moved to the Southgate neighborhood. One of his brothers, John, started playing the guitar. Araya got a bass guitar at the age of 13 so that he could jam with his brother. Araya's brother John later founded the band Bloodcum with Joey Hanneman, the brother of Jeff Hanneman , which was unsuccessful. John is now a bass and guitar technician at Slayer.

As Tom Araya got older, he began studying to become a therapist . In 1982 he joined Slayer. Araya met his current wife at a gig, has two children with her and lives in Buffalo , Texas .

Equipment

Araya is an endorser for ESP basses and Ampeg SVT amplifiers and boxes. ESP also provides a signature model of his bass with active EMG - pickups ago, which is also distributed in the lower LTD series.

style

Araya at Rock am Ring 2014

The satanic influences on Slayer's early albums came from guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King . From the album South of Heaven , Araya began to write lyrics. These often deal with human abysses, for example Hell on Earth ( South of Heaven ), abortion ( Silent Scream ), the futility of war, depicted from the point of view of ordinary soldiers ( Mandatory Suicide , 1988, or War Ensemble , the internal Radio station of the US troops in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War in early 1991 was voted the most popular song by listeners [read: soldiers]), as well as by serial killers like Ed Gein ( Dead Skin Mask ) or Jeffrey Dahmer ( 213 , on the Album Divine Intervention , 1994).

In stark contrast to the lyrics of his band is Araya's commitment to the Catholic faith. However, he stated that he did not conform to some of the lyrics of his bandmate King, but that he was still able to implement them with passion and did not see his faith endangered by them. Despite his commitment to Catholicism, however, he does not conform to numerous points of church life. For him there is “a single divine law”, the golden rule , which he describes as the “essence of the Ten Commandments that Moses received from God”.

What is striking about his singing style is that he can reproduce text unusually quickly, sometimes swallowing syllables. Examples of this are the song Reborn (on Reign in Blood , 1986) and the title track of the '85 Slayer album Hell Awaits . Tom Araya's singing technique is often based heavily on text-based spoken chant ( recitative ), which sometimes degenerates into an almost animal scream.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Slayer's Tom Araya - Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? In: YouTube.com. March 9, 2016, accessed July 13, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Björn Thorsten Jaschinski: Nice and bloody . In: Rock Hard , No. 267, August 2009, p. 19.

Web links

Commons : Tom Araya  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Tom Araya in the Internet Movie Database (English)