Review Summary: Welcome to the Salty Spittoon, how tough are ya?
With the release of Pantera’s seventh album, their evolution from glam metal nobodies to groove metal pioneers reached its ultimate culmination. 1994’s Far Beyond Driven famously managed to get #1 on the Billboard 200 and did so without the band watering down their signature sound. On the contrary, the band’s aggressive tendencies seemed to only amplify with the riffs getting blunter, the vocals more abrasive, and the songwriting less forgiving. However, I find this shift also led to their most unpleasant traits getting just as accentuated, resulting in what can be generously called a mixed bag.
Fortunately, the album manages to start with some of its strongest tracks. “Becoming” is one of the band’s strongest songs as its compact structure does well to highlight the dissonant yet oddly catchy squealing main riff, well-contrasted vocal lines during the verses, and a solid chorus. “Strength Beyond Strength” also manages to be a decent opener despite its sudden crashing introduction thanks to its neat guitar work halfway through and the riff sets on “Five Minutes Alone” and “I’m Broken” are memorable despite the vocals’ overbearing tough guy-isms seemingly going out of their way to distract the listener.
That obnoxiousness reaches an early peak with the utterly abysmal “Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills.” The slow burn bass line shows some promise but is immediately undermined by the guitars providing harsh supplementary noise and an overall directionless structure that enables Phil Anselmo’s most self-indulgent diatribe on record. The mix of douchebag spoken word and building shrieks is annoying yet oddly funny and there is amusement in its alpha male cuckold narrative lending to some unintentionally homoerotic interpretation with some of the phrases. It’s easily the worst song Pantera ever released, but at least we can take solace in it being less than three minutes long.
The lingering stink can make subsequent tracks hard to stick around for, but at least it never reaches those depths again. “Hard Line Sunken Cheeks” and “25 Years” offer some promise with the former’s dips into slow sludge and the latter’s more sinister riff set, but the structures lack a hook to make them truly stand out. “Shedding Skin” also attempts to shake things up with subtle melodic textures, but lacks follow through. I can also admit that the disjointed nature of “Use My Third Arm” and “Throes of Rejection” could be compelling, but just don’t appeal to my personal sensibilities.
But with all this mayhem running amok, the closing cover of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan” manages to be quite interesting. It’s a very well-done rendition as its quieter presentation is a pleasant comedown and the band’s less-effects driven approach gives it an earthier touch compared to the spaced out original. However, it bares mentioning that the album’s liner notes included a hilariously defensive paragraph from Anselmo all but apologizing for the song’s inclusion and how it didn’t reflect them going soft. Considering how his other band Down would have an equally melodic original song on NOLA just a year later, I can’t help but wonder if he had a change of heart in that time or if he was unintentionally admitting that he thought Pantera fans were closed-minded meatheads.
Most albums that I consider mediocre are usually just a dull malaise of interchangeably okay songs that only occasionally rise or fall beyond boredom. With that in mind, it is fascinating how Far Beyond Driven’s mediocrity is based more on how it offers things that I love and hate about the band in near equal measure. Perhaps I’d grade it higher had “Good Friends and a Bottle of Pills” been cut, but I could say the inverse had “Becoming” not been here. Even the good songs on here come with their hang-ups and listening to this album feels like a contest between promising ideas and overcompensating attitude. I can understand the significance of what it achieved at the time and the appeal that it still holds for many, but that doesn’t necessarily make it fun for me to listen to.
If Far Beyond Driven is the Salty Spittoon, then I might have to go back to my Weenie Hut Jr.’s in Power Metal. I’m clearly not tough enough for this.
