Fly To The Angels

"Fly to the Angels" was a world-wide hit for Slaughter, charting #1 on four separate charts including Mainstream Rock. It is also the only Slaughter single to go platinum, and so is their greatest success as far as sales go. It appears to be a requiem for a long-lost, perhaps deceased, lover or close friend. It was also yet another power ballad, at the turn of the 1980s/1990s decade when it seemed every heavy metal band had to release one power ballad in order to chart.

Slaughter had two other Hot 100 charters, "Up All Night" and "Spend My Life," both also in the early '90s. The band seemed to suffer from being compared to a lot of the "hair bands" of the time, particularly Skid Row, and from arriving on the metal scene right when grunge was about to come out of Washington and wipe heavy metal off the map for awhile.

"Slaughter" sounds like a typical name for a heavy metal band - but it's actually the surname of the lead singer, Mark Slaughter. How's that for luck? In the '00s, Mark Slaughter started a new band called Scrap Metal, featuring several other '80s/'90s metal leads including Gunnar Nelson, Kelly Keagy, and Eric Martin.

The cover art for Stick It To Ya depicts a classic circus trick: an assistant strapped to a round disk into which several knives have been stuck. This was an old circus stunt, in which that disk would actually spin while a professional knife thrower flung daggers at it, just missing the assistant and sometimes making a nice pattern around her body. This wheel is called "the Wheel of Death" and the act is part of the category known as "impalement arts." Contrary to popular belief, there are usually no illusory tricks to these stunts - knife throwers are just that good and though they may know a trick or two of how to throw them, those are real knives flying through the air.