Pantera: The Great Southern Trendkill : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The world is full of musical extremists, but few of them work those extremes as hard as Pantera. Combining forces both compelling and repellent, the Texas thrash-metal band's fourth major-label album seethes with sentiments that are as harsh and grinding as the music that carries them. Pantera lashes out at cops and criminals, addicts and addiction, poseurs and punks, the affluent and the underclass with equal venom. Jolting in its gentleness, "Suicide Note Pt. I" is a droning, morose meditation that gets blown to bits by the brutal anger of "Suicide Note Pt. II." In "War Nerve," frontman Philip Anselmo spews his gnarly invective at the media (which came down hard on him for inflammatory comments he made last year regarding race relations), and "13 Steps to Nowhere" offers a dose of twisted cynicism that would make Axl Rose's head spin: "A backward swastika, the black skin riddled in lead/A Nazi gangster Jew, it beats a dog that's dead." As convoluted as it is provocative, the complexity of Pantera's extremes actually saves the band from being easily dismissed as bigots.