Pantera - Floods

Throughout the day, mankind played with grenades.

Album: The Great Southern Trendkill [8th album]
Recorded: Texas & New Orleans
Genre: Metal, Groove Metal
Album Release: May 7th 1996
Single Release: May 22nd 1996 [3rd single]
Length: 6:59
Producer: Pantera & Terry Date
Vocalist: Phil Anselmo [age 27]
Label: Elektra Records & East West Records

Official Audio


Live

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 40 million
YouTube Music: Over 25 million
Guitar World's Best Guitar Solos of All Time: #15 [played by Dimebag Darryl]

Credits

Bass, drums, guitar

Details

• The Great Southern Trendkill is the heaviest and darkest of Pantera's albums, dealing with subjects such as drug addiction, suicide and depression. Many of the band members were contending with personal problems while recording and the group had such severe internal conflicts that the vocalist Phil Anselmo recorded his parts in New Orleans while the rest of the band recorded theirs in Texas. They were in separate states, over 700 miles apart from each other, but it wasn't far enough away to keep the bands simmering tensions from boiling over.
  
  Anselmo was in New Orleans to record with his side project 'Down', which might at first seem innocuous , but it was this growing interest in side projects that eventually led to the end of Pantera and triggered a tragic chain of events.
  
  When your world feels like it's falling down it's tempting to make things biblical, as if the universe itself is conspiring against you, and that's exactly what Pantera did on 'Floods', referring to the story of Noah. Anselmo compares the modern life of 1996 with the ancient world that incurred God's wrath and wills the almighty to bring the flood once more: "wash away us all, take us with the flood."
  
  Anselmo claims people are worthy of destruction because we've turned away from religion 'at night they might bait the pentagram, extinguishing the sun'. A lyric about people turning away from God would be taken as a given by metal audiences as Satanic imagery is commonplace in the genre. Pantera even refer to themselves as the 'cowboys from hell'. Extinguishing the sun can be interpreted as an attempt to extinguish God, the good, represented by light, which makes all things clear.
  
  At the end of 'Floods' heavy rain can be clearly heard. The singer has had his prayers answered and the rains have come. Well done, Phil! There were plenty of people living happily in 1996 and I was one of them. 
  
  As a song, 'Floods' works well and is rightfully regarded as a highpoint in metal because it captures Anselmo's futility so succinctly. He's had enough and wants the world to end. As a piece of art, I can respect it. I know he hasn't really become a Bond villain and started plotting the destruction of the human race. His lyrics are the pleas of a desperate man looking for help, but still, Phil, for fucks sake, the entire world? 
  
  
• The Great Southern Trendkill is both the name of the album and a statemet of its intent. When it was released, groove metal had been around since the start of the 90's and thrash, its parent-genre, even longer. Many in metal were ready for something new, and it wouldn't be long before nu-metal bands were riding high in the charts. With the release of this album Pantera planted their flag firmly in the soil of groove and let the world know they wouldn't be changing their sound for anyone.
  
  According to rateyourmusic.com, in 1996 there were 196 groove metal albums released and 50 nu-metal albums, which is roughly 300% more groove than nu. In 2001, there were 95 groove metal albums released and 532 in the nu-metal genre. In five short years, the number of releases in groove metal fell by half while those in nu-metal had grown by over 900%.
  
  'The Great Southern Trendkill' didn't halt the rise of nu-metal, or stop Pantera's contemporaries such as Machine Head, from changing their sound, but it did inform Pantera fans what they could expect from the band.
  

  

  Machine Head's change groove to nu
  

  
  
• The Great Southern Trendkill would be the fourth and final Pantera album produced by Terry Date. The band felt themselves ready to handle production duties from that point on and appointed the brothers Dimebag Darryl (guitar) and Vinnie Paul (drums) to steer their next effort.
  
  The Abbott Brothers did a stand-up job on what would be Pantera final album, Reinventing the Steel (2000), and had led the band long before Anselmo joined in 1986 as a fresh-faced 18 year old. The Abbott brothers had formed Pantera while still in high school, handling production on their first three albums. 
  
  
• Pantera started as a glam metal group moving towards a heavier sound when they replaced original singer Terry Glaze with Phil Anselmo. Their first three albums are glam metal, though what is now thought of as Pantera began with their fifth release Cowboys From Hell. The band themselves refer to Cowboys as their official debut.
• Terry Date would go on to produce now classic metal albums such as White Pony (2000) by Deftones.
  
  

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