Review Summary: Music to shove kids in lockers to
Pantera and I have a very complicated history. I’m sure there’s an alternate reality in which this review does not have a reason to exist, because the multiple editorials praising the attitude in the vocals and lyrical content, as well as Dimebag’s virtuosic solos, will have said everything I wanted to say in said reality far better than anything my words could provide. There’s certainly a timeline where what bothers me about
Vulgar Display of Power simply doesn’t matter. I say this so as to warn present and future readers that this is not from the usual perspective of most of this bands’ detractors, nor is it coming from a background of a sheltered listener that thinks their stuff is “too hardcore” for them. The biggest issue about this album, to me, is what it represents as a piece of work.
I would be a fool to dismiss this as a whole as a meritless, artless, tuneless slog of the same tunes, but what you see is what you get; the album cover is actually a perfect representation of what this album is trying to do. It’s not even a case of this being a fundamentally good idea with poor execution. If this style of metal is what you seek, and you do not have the same issues with its presentation, then it can stand as a piece of mindless fun groovy metal. I will admit, Dimebag did know his way around a good solo. Vinnie Paul was a solid drummer, and he does exactly what’s asked of him here without overshadowing anything else. Rex Brown’s bass playing is probably the strongest part of this album, and Anselmo does deliver his lines with a ton of grit and attitude.
Now, onto the reason this review exists past the notion of “objectivity”,
Vulgar Display of Power lives and dies by its hyper-masculine presentation. To put it simply, it’s an album meant to evoke an attitude of standing up for yourself and being who you want to be, but it falters by only evoking said attitude in the most overly stereotypical “bro” sort of way, much like future influences Five Finger Death Punch do all the time when they aren’t participating in a common favorite American pastime of kissing up to the United States military. Anselmo’s vocals sound pretty much exactly like how a high-school bully would sound as they’re shoving you into a locker for being wimpy, weak, and frail. Nowhere is this more pertinent than on hit song “Walk”, where that hyper-masculine attitude comes intertwined with a heavy dose of “Southern pride” so to say. “Mouth for War” is also a big offender in this category.
It’s true that some of the lyrical content isn’t completely consumed by this sense of aggro macho-ness; “Fucking Hostile” is written as somewhat of a critique of the government, with lines about how it doesn’t make sense for them to arrest people for smoking the Devil’s lettuce. But apart from the two main songs where the pace slows down (“This Love”, “Hollow”) and we get a different tone from the boys, it’s a bit hard to parse through the barrage of aggro riffs and heavy vocals to separate it from that attitude the band has here. It still sounds like a punch in the face regardless of its depth.
Another major issue is its production; Dime’s tone in particular flat-out sucks. The trend of bands in the 1990s scooping the mids created a very grating guitar sound that just does not sound good through a current-day lens. People frequently malign the move to kempers and amp sims, but I’d argue even that sounds better than this time. It’s not like the 90’s was completely bereft of good guitar tones; hell,
Dirt from Alice in Chains came out a year later and sounded a thousand times fuller than the tone on this album and the ones that’d follow from this band. Metallica’s 1990s material eclipses this in at least the tone of the guitars tracked on record. Maybe Anselmo and co. should’ve called Bob Rock.
Vulgar Display of Power is one of those albums where its very existence feels like it’s meant to target the “wimpy, weak, and frail” of society, and seeing as the people it brings in view those who don’t tow the traditional gender role line and aren’t beholden to masculinity as wimpy, weak, and frail, I feel compelled to stand with those people over the high school bullies. Pantera themselves may not have meant it this way, but this album has taken on a life of its own as a representation of hating people who are different. That, combined with incidents such as Phil Anselmo’s Nazi salute at Dimebash in 2016 and the fans that vociferously targeted the band Nuclear Hellfrost for what their lead singer did as a form of expressing their dislike for the band a near-decade ago, ultimately shows that Pantera is entirely not a band for me, and
Vulgar Display of Power is not an album for me.
