First a quick recap: Tori Amos was great! I actually think I've only heard "Crucify" from this before, but the whole album was really great. I have listened a lot more to "Under the Pink" through the years,, which is also brilliant. ZZ Top is ZZ Top. Really. Silly and dumb but also groovy and fun. Which makes a perfect lead-in to Pantera. I don't rememeber who, but some music critic once wrote that Pantera sounds as if ZZ Top would have played Slayer songs, which I find very true.
Pulling this album now is a pretty strange coincidence, as I just recently dug out and listened to Panteras first albums on YouTube (actually reasearch for a potential academic article!). The first four albums are full of dumb, crude, pubertal and fun metal songs with titles like "Ride My Rocket", "Heavy Metal Rules!" (yes, really!), "Hot and Heavy" and "Burnnnn". The change in sound and tonality on "Cowboys from Hell" onward was radical, but I can definitely hear the traces of later day Pantera in those early albums, both sonically and thematically. I mean, yeah the lyrics got a bit rawer and more hard edged, but we're still not talking sophistication here. Thematically "Heavy Metal Rules!" and "Fucking Hostile" is basically the same song. The difference is merely in the semantics. On the surface it is a huge shift sonically, but scratch that surface and it's still based around Dimebag Darrells huge riffs and a boogie groove (not unlike ZZ Top!) that makes the songs feel huge. And I get a feeling that they're still these, almost caricatures of, crude, dumb, pubertal and fun metal heads underneath the tough veneer, even on songs like "By Demons Be Driven" or "Mouth of War".
Dimebag Darrell was one of the truly great metal guitarists, and the best proof of that is the main riff to "Walk". It's probably one of the easiest classic riffs in the metal canon on paper (two notes and a slight bend), but really fucking hard to get right. It's all in the groove.
I was a fan of Pantera in the early 90s, and it was one of the few metal bands I kept listening to even as my tastes shifted and was widened from metal and punk to alternative rock, hip hop and pop. They turned hard when other big 80s metal bands like Guns n' Roses, Metallica and Megadeth went soft, and in the process also changed the trajectory of the whole metal genre in the 90s. Today their reputation has been tarnished by Anselmos neo-nazi antics, and the horrible death of Darrell puts their entire output in a tragic relief. But the incredible four album run from "Cowboys from Hell" to "The Great Southern Trendkill" still kicks ass.
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