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
Australia (albums): #2 [certified gold]
Finland (albums): #4
New Zealand (albums): #4
UK (albums): #4 [1x silver]
USA (albums): #4 [1x platinum]
Spotify: 44,000,000 +
YouTube Music: 26,000,000 +
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 but it wasn't far enough away from each other to keep the bands simmering tensions from boiling over.
Anselmo was in New Orleans to record with his other band 'Down', which might seem innocuous at first, but it was this growing interest in side projects that eventually led to the end of Pantera and triggered a chain of tragic events detailed below [see the story of Dimebad Darryl].
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'. The 'Floods' from the title refers to the deluge in Genesis, when God wiped the world clean and started again. Anselmo compares the modern world 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 we're 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 refers to an attempt at extinguishing God, the good, represented by the light, which makes all things clear.
At the end of the song heavy rain can be heard clearly. The singer has had his prayers answered and the rains have come. Well done, Phil. There were people living quite happily in 1996 and I was one of them. It's not my fault a bunch of metalheads on the other side of the world got addicted to drugs and wished doom on everyone because they couldn't overcome their problems.
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 gone all 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, all of us? - '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, as they were known, did a stand-up job on what would be
Pantera final album, 2000's 'Reinventing the Steel', and had led the
band long before Anselmo joined in 1986 as a fresh-faced 18 year old.
The Abbott brothers had formed the band while still in high school,
handling production on their first three albums.
- On Dember 8th 2004, one of the greatest guitarists in the history of
metal, Dimebag Darryl, was shot to death on stage in Ohio while playing
with Damageplan. His brother, Vinnie Paul, the drummer in the same band,
was sat only a few feet away. When the shots rang out Paul stood up with a jolt from
behind his kit. Unfortunately, it was too late. There was nothing he
could do. He couldn't save his little brother, bandmate and best friend,
who had been shot in the head. Three other people died in the killing
spree, four if you include the gunman himself.
Dimebag and Vinnie had only started Damageplan as a way of keeping busy after the acrimonious end of Pantera in 2003. Pantera, who topped the US album charts in 1994 with 'Far Beyond Driven', would never have had such lax security arrangements, but it was Damageplan who were playing Ohio that night, and Vinnie Paul never forgot it. Paul blamed the erratic behaviour of Phil Anselmo, Pantera's vocalist, for the the downfall of the band. To make matters worse, Anselmo told Metal Hammer magazine "he deserves to be beaten severely" when talking about Dimebag. To make matters even worse the interview was published in the same year as the murders took place. The excerpt can be read below.
"He would attack me, vocally. And just knowing that he was so much smaller than me I could kill him like a fuckin' piece of vapour, you know, he would turn into vapour, his chin would, at least, if I fuckin' smacked it. And he knows that. The world should know that. So physically, of course, he deserves to be beaten severely.
But of course, that's criminal and I won't do such a thing. Really, I just let him prattle on. I grew very tired of it very quickly, and whenever it came up, like it has come up today, I just chose to wish them the best of luck." (Anselmo talking to Metal Hammer in 2004)
Phil Anselmo wasn't invited to the funeral. Vinnie Paul vowed to never to speak to Anselmo again, and kept his word for the remainder of his life, turning down many lucrative reunion tours in the process. Vinnie Paul died in 2018 at the age of 54. Old scars often run the deepest.
The man who carried out the shooting, Nathan Gale, told people Pantera were his favourite band but on that cruel December night he destroyed them forever. Whether or not Gale was motivated by the interview in Metal Hammer is a secret he took with him to the grave. Even though Pantera's 2003 split was bitter, in life things can always change. Maybe the band would have reconciled given time. When Gale slaughtered 4 innocent people he not only put to bed any chance of a real Pantera reunion he also destroyed the hopes of millions of fans who never got to see the band play live.
- Pantera started as a glam metal band 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 proper 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 'Deftones - White Pony'.
Artwork
