Pantera
Reinventing Hell: The Best Of Pantera

THE REVIEW

2003: the year of Dimebag Darrel's death; a guitar monster leaves us, the inventor of a new way to play heavy music, the father of the subsequent Alternative Metal current, but above all the mind of the Pantera. The American band disbands immediately, shocked by the killing; moreover, the Pantera in 2003 release their last Best Of, the album's name is Reinventing Hell, an enticing title just like the music of the four wild metalheads.

Many of you probably don't know that Phil Anselmo, (current leader of Down) the legendary voice of the group, joined Pantera only six years after their foundation and that in the early '80s Vinnie Paul & co. played something like a genre similar to Motley Crue!

But of these Pantera, rightly, Reinventing Hell does not speak: for this album Phil Anselmo has always been in the band, and the genre dealt with has always been that ear-splitting Thrash that made them famous and from which they have never strayed. 

In fact, the album deals only with works starting from the great Cowboys From Hell (1990), up to Reinventing The Steel (2000), but it doesn't simply include songs present in the already released albums, rather it includes other unreleased tracks such as "The Badge", composed for the soundtrack of the great movie "The Crow"; after all, Pantera wouldn't have been so banal as to make an album that included only their old tracks: the unpredictability and total disinterest in money in favor of Their Music are indeed some of the basic characteristics of the four Texans.

The album is intended as a farewell to the fans, with whom Pantera have always had an unparalleled relationship, and this farewell leaves us with a truly truthful image of the band: old lighter masterpieces like "Hollow" are left out, and space is given exclusively to true music (from the band's point of view) with bursts of purely Thrash energy: it starts with the magnificent "Cowboys From Hell", which anticipates the head-splitting "Domination", sometimes there are brief melodic pauses, one of these is "Cemetery Gates", but it's immediately picked up with more heavy metal, primarily "Mouth For War" and the eternally underrated "Revolution Is My Name". 

The CD is, in my opinion, perfectly successful. Through the mixing of tracks that are quite distant in time but not in style, we discover the great coherence of Pantera, who have always continued to make their own kind of music (unlike most bands that became famous), satisfying themselves before others, because Anselmo himself says: "I am first of all a fan of my band, and therefore I try never to disappoint myself". 

It is a perfectly studied work, which is necessary to understand all subsequent music as well, because Phil, Dimebag, Vinnie and Rex have changed the way of playing forever, the Korn owe much to Pantera. The '90s, for us metalheads, in a certain sense, are Pantera.