Where Did Pantera Get the Cover Art for Far Beyond Driven

Dan Franklin turns the clock back 20 years to this turning bespeak Pantera anthology

"I fucked your girlfriend last night./ While you snored and drooled, I fucked your love."

Now I have your attention, let's spend five minutes (preferably lone) because Pantera'south Far Beyond Driven. Their tertiary anthology proper was commercially the apex of their career – in that it topped the Billboard nautical chart in the United states – but as well the record that signalled the commencement of the finish of the ring, the kickoff steps on a dark route that culminated in the murder of its totemic talent, the greatest hard stone guitar histrion of all fourth dimension, Dimebag Darrell.

That spoken lyric introduces the runway 'Expert Friends And A Canteen Of Pills', which functions equally a joint around which the album pivots. The 4 songs that precede it exude the swagger and sheer humbug that defined Pantera'southward quantum album Vulgar Display Of Power and particularly its signature vocal, 'Walk'. Its key refrain, "Are you lot talking to me?", echoing Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and his iconic address to himself in the mirror, both accuses in the second person merely is simultaneously self-critical. It encapsulates the confrontation at the heart of Pantera's work, outwardly manifesting concrete threat simply likewise inhabiting an increasingly bleak introspection. This was a period when singer and lyricist Philip Anselmo later compared his energy and conviction to a Slayer concert, before the chronic dorsum hurting, before heroin, before Dimebag'south murder, when it all slowed to a Saint Vitus dirge. The pressure to be a 'Superman' to his audience and the media began to take its toll.

Compare the ii anthology covers: the blurred-out, fist-to-the-confront aggressive energy of Vulgar Display, and the original (subsequently withdrawn) Far Beyond Driven encompass, a drill bit inserted into the splayed anus of an anonymous female body, subsequently replaced with a drill into a shaved cranium resembling Anselmo'due south. The tone of explicit and degrading cruelty of 'Skilful Friends And A Bottle of Pills' is evident in that original cover, just the replacement shows it can simply equally easily be self-inflicted. "I serve too many masters" screams a wounded, pitiful Anselmo, describing the wronged boyfriend going on to slit the narrator's wrists and neck: "But you wouldn't know what you were doing because I didn't." On this album, Pantera began to elevate metal music to extreme psychodrama, a course perfected past Korn on their debut (and never recaptured later their sound was codification as 'nu metal').

'Good Friends And A Canteen of Pills' is, really, barely a song: a ratatatat rolling double bass tattoo, with the anchor of Rex Chocolate-brown'due south bass, and the wrenched squeals and pinched harmonics of the guitar lines roaring around and vying with the motif. It seems to enact a collapse in songwriting itself, which bleeds into the far less disciplined latter half of the album. When the band used it equally an introduction tape to their concerts, the bulletin seemed to be that all bets were off, the rails'south tale of animalism and retaliation tightening the screw in a charged up temper: anti-music, indigent self-loathing, all kinds of filth were possibilities in the ensuing melee.

On the confront of it album opener 'Strength Beyond Force' is an anthem of self-empowerment, though it takes equally its opening position pure nihilism ("There is nada. No instruction. No family unit life to open up my arms to…"), and so downright societal warmongering: "But I'm helping to legalize dope on your pristine streets and I'grand making a fortune." The haemorrhaging thrash undercurrent gives way to the kind of breakdown that ensured Pantera concerts were violent arenas of male catharsis, populated by gig goers: "Hard as a rock. Shut like a lock."

What follows though are iii of Pantera's tightest and finest songs: 'Becoming', 'Five Minutes Alone' and 'I'm Cleaved'. 'Becoming' boasts some of the finest feet work of drummer (and Dimebag's older brother) Vinnie Paul, whose double bass pedal fluency locks the riff into a churning cement mixer groove, Darrell'south guitar incandescent and sparking in Catherine Wheel swirls; 'Five Minutes Alone' is arguably the greatest riff the band e'er produced, expanding on the tight two-note curve-and-snap of 'Walk' with an electrifying descending bridge and a grim drag-the-body-to-the-lake momentum; likewise 'I'm Broken' locks bassist Rex Dark-brown and Dimebag into a lock-step stoner groove, a succinct masterpiece of meaning space and weighty craft, topped with a scenic, almost wry guitar solo, on an album adorned with surprisingly few of them.

Anselmo reigns supreme over the start one-half of the album, his lyrics framed and delivered in his (by now familiar) braced, confrontational stance, but also elliptical and obtuse, rich in symbolism and wordplay: "A long time ago I never knew myself. Then the memory of shame birthed its souvenir." The confidence of growing "Godsize" on 'Condign' is underpinned with an ill-defined abuse (of power) and manipulation: "Belittle your friends to serve me, to suck me, to realize my saving grasp." And on 'Five Minutes Lone' it develops into the proclamations of a tyrannical king: "You've waged a war of nerves/But you tin can't trounce the kingdom." (He afterward transplanted the concept of the 'War Nerve' to title their most dissonantly heavy track on their next album). You begin to ask if this tower of strength protests likewise much.

He switches person on 'I'thousand Broken': his imprecation of "Inherit my life" transmuted to "Inherit your life". Whereas Trent Reznor used to hone all his songs around his ego and id, whether vulnerable ("I hurt myself today") or desirous ("I want to fuck you like an animal"), Anselmo uses Pantera to reflect the world, refract it through his blunt but increasingly nuanced psychology, and and then lash out with maximum ferocity. It's the extent to which the band manages to channel its own burning energy which determines the musicality of their output, only one of the surprises of an album as successful equally Far Across Driven is how they lose control of that relentless drive: the train comes off the tracks.

'Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks' says it all: "I drink all twenty-four hours. I fume all twenty-four hour period. I accept your daughter's breath abroad. I've washed it all just tap the vein." Here is both the vainglorious boasting and the intonation of the band's undoing. Its lyrics seem to speak to the conflation of the personal torso and religious idols; the self-defined "unlord" merely besides the fascinating self-sensation of Anselmo and the band'southward human relationship with their own audition, and what responsibility this brings: "As a child I was given the gift to entertain you lot./ Merely through blood I inherited a life that could destroy yous."

Compare how Anselmo rejects his begetter in '25 Years' and casts himself as the "bounder father" to his fanbase: "You'll never be the male parent I am. The bastard begetter to the thousands of the ugly. Criticized, the unwanted. The ones with fathers just like you. We're fucking y'all back." There'due south a covenant here, a 'satanic' ane perhaps ("my soul for a caprine animal"), merely when Anselmo technically died for four minutes mid-tour in 1996 every bit a result of a heroin overdose it problematized this relationship. "I've done it all but tapped the vein": Anselmo had been undone by some other avowal.

This peril of his ain personality perchance accounts for the number of accusations that dogged his career in Pantera: of racism, of homophobia and why some spectators (and for a long time Vinnie Paul) attributed arraign to him for adding to a delirious temper of partitioning among its fan when Pantera splintered after the turn of the century. Not least pertaining to a annotate of Anselmo's that made it onto the embrace of the December 2004 effect of Metallic Hammer magazine, when he stated that "Dimebag deserves to be browbeaten severely". When schizophrenic ex-marine Nathan Gale shot Darrell dead onstage on the ceremony of John Lennon's murder on December eight 2004 at the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio every bit he was playing the opening songs of new band Damageplan'south set, these words cast a heavy drapery over the mitt-wringing that followed.

However, there is no evidence that they influenced Gale's actions.

For an album made ten years earlier at their peak, Far Beyond Driven evinces that the early on (musical) cracks were first to bear witness. After 'Slaughtered', with its sliding riff reminiscent of 'Mouth For State of war' these tracks actually lack much structural coherence. The breakdown riff in 'Employ My 3rd Arm' was an off-cutting from unreleased Vulgar Display runway 'Piss'; '25 Years' consists of an off-fourth dimension single notation poesy which lacks imagination; 'Shedding Skin' is more than compelling with its chunky outro giving mode to a make clean, picked autonomously spoken verse. But the proof is born out in the live renderings of these tracks: the stop of 'Throes Of Rejection' was tacked onto the stop of 'Becoming' and the others were rarely given an airing. In fact these three tracks mirror the earlier exemplary triumvirate but in negative, propelled by a ragged rhythmic play and sorely lacking in melodic maturity. Having said that, Vulgar Brandish Of Power's second half is also nowhere well-nigh equally strong as its first. Pantera liked to summit-load their albums, and you lot tin can fence that this is a journeying where the loosening musical discipline very deliberately conveys to its lyrical themes of inner exploration and agony.

What these latter songs did contain were overt, asunder elements of extreme metal − particularly the diggings runs at the beginning of 'Utilise My Third Arm' − that presaged the savage intensity of the band's follow-upwards, The Slap-up Southern Trendkill. That album paired black metal and even grindcore with the atmospherics and mood of 'Hard Lines, Sunken Cheeks'.

Tensions in the band surfaced and Anselmo recorded the album separately from the rest, in a studio called Zero in New Orleans, belonging to Trent Reznor (who else?). That album, released in 1996, is their almost underrated, and information technology is also their best, with a swell sense of the emotional theatre that Anselmo has in common with his beloved Morrissey, and showcasing some really astounding performances from the ring. Darrell'due south solos on 'ten's' and 'Floods' are two of the best in the genre.

An interesting choice for Far Beyond Driven's terminal track is a sensitive comprehend of Black Sabbath's blissed-out, stoned-free 'Planet Caravan'. Anselmo pre-empted a backfire in the liner notes, stating that this choice of cover was cipher to do with "the integrity of the band'due south direction", when really it was exactly that. As the Ozzfest festival started in the mid-1990s Black Sabbath were recovered as the founding fathers of heavy metal and Pantera strove to cast themselves equally their successors, protesting all along that they had neither the help of MTV nor the mainstream music media, that they were a band of the people and word-of-oral cavity solitary. This is exaggeration. The ready from the 1994 Donington Monsters of Stone festival included in the 20th anniversary edition of the album was originally circulate (in part) on MTV.

In many ways Pantera actually epitomised the MTV-anointed cult mainstream of the 90s. "I Detest Alternative Music" reads Anselmo's T-shirt in the clip below from one of their professionally-filmed shows later on the release of Trendkill, but Pantera were always truly the viable stone music alternative, closer to Rage Confronting The Auto than, say, Testament. The inclusion of bonus rail and Poison Thought embrace 'The Bluecoat' on The Crow soundtrack, with its mainstream gothic credentials, confirms this - it verges on self-parody, even sampling the horrific conclusion of Taxi Driver in its outro.

As much equally Far Beyond Driven divers their success, it is also the epigraph of the struggle that defined their last five years. With Far Beyond Driven, Pantera met the mainstream head-on and seemed to wrestle with that approbation. But its considerable ability and abrasiveness remains intact: it dragged a genre obsessed with the fantastical into the inner core of the human psyche – a dangerous, compelling place to be; the heed a terrible matter to gustatory modality.

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Source: https://thequietus.com/articles/14805-pantera-far-beyond-driven-review

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