Review Summary: Pantera ditches their old sound to make a true heavy metal classic.
Never mind that Pantera had released 4 studio albums prior to 1990's Cowboys from Hell. Never mind that they spent their first 9 years blindly following the mid-80s hair-metal craze. This album took those 9 years, burned them to the ground, and spat on the ashes. This was not another Def Leppard sound-alike. This was not spandex or bleached-blond hair. This was vicious. This was dark and scary. This sounded like Master of Puppets set in the old West- infected gunshot wounds, dysentery and all. This was something different.
For the most part, Cowboys from Hell is pretty formulaic, but goddamn if Pantera doesn't take that formula and make it their bitch. Each of the 12 songs on the album serves up its own variation of the punishingly heavy, relentlessly groovy thrash metal that Pantera is now famous for. Some center around guitarist “Diamond” Darrell Abbott's nimble, surprisingly catchy riffs (see “Psycho Holiday” and “Clash with Reality”, as well as the titular opening track), and others star the band's impressively tight rhythm section, consisting of bassist Rex Brown and drummer Vinnie Paul (see “Primal Concrete Sledge”, “Message in Blood”, and “The Art of Shredding”). Vocalist Phil Anselmo does an outstanding job on nearly every track, stretching his gravelly voice up into a Rob Halford-esque scream and down into a beastly growl in all the right places. And when Anselmo taps into his glam-metal roots on album highlight “Cemetery Gates”, the result is truly stunning- his clean vocal during the verses complement the song's pacing and mood perfectly without making it seem corny or overworked.
The lyrics, probably the least impressive aspect of the album overall, run the gamut from vaguely anti-authoritarian political sentiment to descriptions of war, violence, or mental illness, and pretty much every heavy-metal lyrical trope in between. The most notable exception is “Cemetery Gates”, an unexpectedly bittersweet account of the narrator's confusion and anger over the death of the woman he loved.
Cowboys from Hell is nearly an hour long, and that length can make the album feel a bit exhausting at times, given the nonstop intensity of most of the tracks. But all nitpicking aside, you'd be hard-pressed to find a purer distillation of everything that's awesome about heavy metal. Plain and simple, this album kicks ass, and even when it isn't absolutely perfect, it's still a whole lot of fun.
