Released: August 7, 1996
The band recorded this album in two separate states without being in the same room. Phil Anselmo tracked his vocals alone at Nothing Studios in New Orleans—Trent Reznor’s facility—while Dimebag Darrell, Rex Brown, and Vinnie Paul recorded the music at Chasin Jason Studios in Dalworthington Gardens, Texas. The sessions ran from October 1995 through February 1996. The distance wasn’t logistical. It was the physical expression of tensions that had been building since Far Beyond Driven and that would eventually end the band entirely. Terry Date and Vinnie Paul produced and mixed—the last time Date worked with Pantera after a run that started with Cowboys from Hell in 1990.
The eighth studio album arrived May 7, 1996, on East West Records, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200, went gold on June 25, and stayed on the chart for over sixteen weeks. Platinum certification didn’t come until August 2004 — eight years after release, which reflects how the record’s reputation grew over time. Mixed at Larrabee Sound Studios in Los Angeles, mastered by Tom Baker at Future Disc and Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound. Ulrich Wild also recorded; Sterling Winfield and Aaron Barnes were studio assistants in Texas; Sean Beavan handled New Orleans engineering. Two guests contributed: Seth Putnam of Anal Cunt delivered additional screams on “War Nerve,” “13 Steps to Nowhere,” and “Suicide Note Pt.” 2″—Anselmo later said of Putnam, “I got his humor like the back of my “fist”—and Ross Karpelman played keyboards on “Suicide Note Pt. 1” and “Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath). ” The album’s title came from the band’s distaste for trends and conformity, a feeling Anselmo said intensified after hearing Metallica’s Load while the record was being finished.
“The Great Southern Trendkill” opens the record—the title track’s screams are so extreme that listeners compared Anselmo’s own layered vocal approach to Putnam’s style, the two nearly indistinguishable in the arrangement. “War Nerve” continues before “Drag the Waters”—the single, released April 15, three weeks before the album, the video directed by Dimebag himself—is the record’s most accessible moment. Dimebag described the song as being “about a lifetime of dealing with people that you can’t tell what they’re really comin’ at you for, or what their motives really are.” “10’s” and “13 Steps to Nowhere” stay locked in the album’s heaviest register before “Suicide Note Pt. 1″—fully acoustic, Karpelman’s keyboards underneath, Anselmo’s delivery at its most measured—is the album’s most unexpected track. The contrast with “Suicide Note Pt. 2″—which follows immediately and is among the heaviest things Pantera recorded is the album’s most deliberate structural choice. The two tracks together run just over nine minutes and sit at the album’s center, pulling in opposite directions from the same point.
“Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath)” returns to the album’s main approach before “Floods” — the longest track at just under seven minutes — closes the primary material. Dimebag’s guitar solo on “Floods” was ranked the fifteenth greatest guitar solo of all time by Guitar World, the arrangement moving through a progressive structure before the solo arrives and takes the track somewhere the rest of the album doesn’t go. “The Underground in America” follows before “(Reprise) Sandblasted Skin” closes the listed tracks—a hidden track of forty-one seconds following after it.
Anselmo’s vocals throughout are the most layered and processed he ever recorded with Pantera, and the record is stronger for the separation—the isolation in Anselmo’s delivery gives the vocals a quality the rest of the catalogue doesn’t have. The Great Southern Trendkill is the record Pantera made while falling apart. It sounds like it.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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