Pantera: Reinventing The Steel : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When Pantera belter Philip Anselmo sings, "It's like religion without a Bible," on "Hellbound," he could be talking about his own band. As Anselmo says in the midst of his metal-revivalist rant "Goddamn Electric," Pantera tap into a part of you that's "always sixteen" and restore your trust "in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath." Despite the title of their tenth album, the great thing about these terrifying Texans is that they don't, in fact, reinvent the steel when it comes to heavy metal. Pantera rely on the genre's primal elements of rage and analog noise, with the only tweak being an increased commitment to cacophony -- just when a song comes close to being catchy, guitarist Dimebag Darrell and drummer Vinnie Paul chop it up with squealing dissonance. Reinventing the Steel is both dumber and smarter than it has to be: brutal enough to please underground purists and familiar enough for weekend headbangers. When you hear the lock-step crunch of "Hellbound," all you can say is, "Hell, yeah!"