Pantera

In the US metal scene, the definitive changing of the guard between the Eighties and the Nineties comes with the final abandonment of the glitter and paillettes still present in the escapades of hair metal, giving way to the explosive force of the sound that Metallica had already been stubbornly pushing forward.

The Texans of Pantera, much like their idols Metallica, began their careers still bearing traces of a more glam leaning, almost a leftover of the success enjoyed by Kiss and Aerosmith. Metallica, though, fired up by the anarchy of punk, seemed right from the start, with “Kill ‘Em All”, to be grinding underfoot the broken glass and shards of the Eighties’ neon lights, not without having taken heed of the lesson coming from the other side of the ocean, from British bands like Venom and Motörhead. Pantera, from Arlington, would get there years later with “Cowboys From Hell”, kicking off an entire subgenre that came to be known as groove metal.

The band members don’t agree on when the sessions took place: according to singer Phil Anselmo, it was 1989, while bassist Rex Brown places it in early 1990. The record was cut at Pantego Sound (the band’s name was inspired by the town of Pantego) and came out in July 1990.

Up to that point, no Texan band had managed to find success playing music this hard-hitting and incisive, at times bordering on violent irritability — and it was perhaps a kind of mirror-image reflection of Texas’s social climate, generally reactionary and hostile to openness, almost a saccharine, caricatured facade of America itself, the same one portrayed in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” through the ghost of Tom Joad.

The linchpin of the band’s sound was none other than Darrell Lance Abbott, better known as Dimebag. A guitar enfant prodige, he founded the band in 1981, and together with his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul, would remain its core, despite the turbulent lifestyles that would lead both of them to lose their lives in less than orthodox ways.

Twenty years on from Dimebag’s death were enough to make listeners realize that Pantera, back at work on a new album, would be hard to imagine without the duo who forged that very name — respectively the anvil and hammer of a sound that nonetheless struggled mightily to claw its way out of the hell that made them just as fierce as they were unshakeable in the face of buttoned-up, Thanksgiving-Day America.

Difficult, but not impossible, if we think of their recent tours that saw them return to the lineup with Zakk Wylde and Charlie Benante (Anthrax) filling the void left by the Abbott brothers.

It was Dimebag himself who got the band their gear with the winnings from guitar competitions, where he stood out for a sound that was both heavy and fast, hyper-technical and shrill, indebted equally to Dave Mustaine and Kerry King, and to Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and above all Eddie Van Halen, from whom he inherited an idyllic emphasis and a flair for arpeggios worthy of a Paganini on loan to the world of thrash metal.

The arrival of the other two permanent members — Rex Brown on bass, followed by Phil Anselmo on vocals — came after repeated lineup changes, during the band's early, formative years, when they had the chance to showcase Darrell's musical skills and Paul's bone-crushing rhythm, a true blacksmith lent out to the drum kit.

Even so, the band still remained too firmly within the ranks of that hard rock which Kiss and Van Halen had already said everything about in America. Anselmo, born in wild, mixed-blood New Orleans, arrived for the fourth album, "Power Metal" (1989), and brought with him a punk, iconoclastic drive. The Abbott brothers, after three not particularly memorable albums, had finally found the vocal expression, the true fury, the stage animal who would worthily embody the reverential dread of the band's very name as frontman. A black panther in Texas had slipped its leash and broken its chains, a unicum in the American metal scene.

Mark Ross, manager at what was then Atco Records, was deeply struck by their live shows, and in 1989 he contacted Terry Date to co-produce their next album.

Rex Brown proved decisive in solidifying their sound, sealing the band's beating heart with a bass so low and doom-laden — often tuned down a full step — yet metallic and pick-driven, to the point of metaphorically resembling a rattlesnake slithering across the deserts on the Arizona-Texas border.

It would become the band's other great trademark, keeping pace with Vinnie Paul to forge one of the most lethal rhythm sections of the Nineties. That rhythm section remained the one constant to this day, even through further lineup changes, with a sound that stayed instantly recognizable and virtually unchanged right up until "The Great Southern Trendkill" (1996).

"Cowboys From Hell," nomen omen, comes out swinging with a sharp, cutting riff worthy of Metallica. Darrell's brazen guitar attack, backed by his immense technical skill, joins forces with the percussive power of Brown's bass and Vinnie's snare rolls, and the band's intentions become clear and unmistakable right away, delivered by Phil's scornful, uncompromising voice. It's the track destined to put them on the map and write them into the history of the genre.

Reverend reverend is this some conspiracy?

Crucified for no sins

An image beneath me

What's within our plans for life?

It all seems so unreal

I’m a man cut in half in this world

Left in my misery…

In "Cemetery Gates," the album's only ballad and perhaps its true masterpiece, we find the motive, the triggering event behind an unbearable expressive urgency, a chronic physical and mental attrition, poised between damnation and redemption, born of the tedium of working-class life but above all of grief — specifically the suicide of a friend of Anselmo's in 1989. In the lyrics he seems to address the atrocity of an unjust, oppressive life that seems to annihilate every certainty and every chance of salvation. The only glimmer of light is just a will-o'-the-wisp beyond the cemetery gates. In a titanic effort to overcome death itself, Anselmo reflects on passing and on the meaning of existence, imagining himself speaking to a reverend. Keeping that fire alive and ethereal, almost as if longing to make the souls of the departed shine, is Darrell's guitar, layered in different parts in the compositional manner of Jimmy Page on "Stairway To Heaven" — one of the most epochal solo passages in the entire genre, comparable in intensity and lyricism only to Kirk Hammett, of whom he clearly proves the natural successor.

Dimebag too would pass through those same gates early, in the incident that took his life — a shooting in 2004, during a concert by his side project, Damageplan.

Another wildly inventive fan favorite, and the album's third single, is "Psycho Holiday", a hallucinatory mirage of an everyday escape into crystalline waters to flee frustration, which instead reveals itself as a reckless, drastic attempt to escape reality, the final outcome of intoxication and substance abuse. The words, screamed without restraint, lucidly lay out the psychotic state he sinks into, accompanied by Dimebag's powerful guitar. Here Anselmo shows off his remarkable vocal range in full, edging close to the singing qualities of Axl Rose, while the doubled-up, obsessive, relentless rhythm section does the rest, making this a genuinely standout track.

The rhythms seem to literally slice the air on "Heresy", with Vinnie Paul's machine-gun bursts amounting to a full-on siege by fire and sword, while Anselmo's screaming highs exalt brazenness and pushing past every imposed limit.

"Domination" further reveals this all-consuming display of intent in even starker terms, more intense and brazen still; in this track you can already glimpse where the band is headed, something they'll make even more menacing on "Vulgar Display Of Power" (1992). Here again, Darrell's solo section can't help but stand out, spilling into the solemn final doom march.

With "Shattered" we're closer to the territory of Guns N' Roses' "Appetite For Destruction", while "Clash With Reality" is another great track that shatters every convention and marriage counseling session, a genuine demolition of the American dream. "Medicine Man" is introduced by snare and bass in an ascending phrase. Here the subject matter could only lead to the alteration of consciousness in all its various forms of intoxication. The shock has turned into tolerance, the skepticism toward the substance is gone, and the frustration and wear and tear remain the same, if anything they seem to worsen in a lucid, depressive down phase. Down, as in the name of Anselmo and Brown's side project years later, and the eventual move toward doom metal is already hinted at here in the following "Message In Blood", a "cryptic warning and a prayer to a God left forgotten" after a lifetime of excess. Darrell's guitar is perhaps at its most acidic here on the whole album.

All that's left is to lie down after this dark night of the soul, wrapped in the coils of bass and guitar laid down by our cowboys. "The Sleep" offers counsel on the unresolved questions left hanging in this darkness, in which, as survivors, one searches for one's own reason for being, in a rare moment of clarity brought on by the blinding glow of Dimebag's symphonic guitar. "The Art Of Shredding" is the epilogue and the wake-up call the morning after. In a thrash metal that seems to merge with "Painkiller" by Judas Priest, which clearly inspired Anselmo, the four of them climb the mountain like Sisyphus, but with the same appetite for destruction the album opened with. Indeed, if Sisyphus's punishment was to push the boulder to the top of the mountain only to watch it roll back down again, here, after many attempts to find meaning in the absurd, the intent seems instead to be to smash it relentlessly into a thousand pieces.

That nihilistic fervor and drive won't soften on "Vulgar Display Of Power" - if anything, it will grow ever darker through to "The Great Southern Trendkill", perhaps the last great album of the Pantera story, in which the sustained groove of "Far Beyond Driven" (1994) will dissolve into Anselmo's black torment and Floods' doom guitars. None of this detracts from "Cowboys From Hell"'s standing as the band's most representative and fully realized album, a fitting inauguration for the decade's metal landscape.

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18/01/2026