Ten songs, thirty eight minutes, and a title that went out of date before the year did.
Recorded at Pantego Sound in the small Texas town the studio took its name from, financed out of the guitarist's father's own control room and pressed on the family label after a bigger company posted the tapes back for being too heavy, the Arlington quartet that stamped two words in block capitals across its fourth sleeve in the spring of 1988 was Pantera, and the record is Power Metal. The record's date is itself disputed, given as May 1988 by some accounts and as 24 June by others.
Two years later the same four men took a blade to their own catalogue and cut that album and the three before it out of the official discography, where they have stayed. So the Pantera power metal question is a problem of dates before it is a problem of taxonomy.
A bell founder cuts his inscription into the mould in wax while the metal is still in the furnace, so the letters that will stand in relief round the waist of the thing are fixed hours before anybody knows what note it will strike. Then the casting comes out of the pit and goes onto the tuner's lathe, where a man shaves metal off the inside until the hum, the prime, the tierce and the nominal drop into their proper intervals. A bell that will not come up to pitch goes back for a full pour with its own promise still standing on it in raised letters.
In the spring of 1988 the two words on a Texas sleeve were already cast, and the note they would finally strike was being cut that same summer in another country. The letters do not move when the note does.
What the two words promised an American buyer
Through the middle of that decade the phrase did duty in club flyers, label advertisements and fanzine columns as a temperature and never as a form, so any record that hit harder and faster than the radio could collect it, which is how the same two words covered Jag Panzer, Metal Church and Manilla Road in one breath and half the speed metal in the racks in the next. The long history of power metal in the States is mostly the history of that looseness.
What the phrase did not promise in America was any of the furniture Europe would later bolt to it and screw down. No trained tenor was implied, no bright resolution at the end of the chorus, no unbroken double bass floor under the riff. It was a boast about volume, attested in print for years before anyone thought to turn it into a specification.
Nor did the usage rule anything out. A shop could file a record under those two words and the buyer carrying it home still had no idea whether a tenor or a shouter was waiting inside, which is the condition every loose phrase is in shortly before somebody nails it to a wall.
The run of titles that came out of that studio before it says the same thing three times over. Metal Magic in 1983, Projects in the Jungle in 1984 and I Am the Night in 1985 are each a claim about heat and none of them a claim about form, and the fourth sleeve simply put the boast itself on the front in capitals. Whether the men making them were ever a glam band is a separate quarrel, and whether Pantera were ever glam is where that one is settled.
The Pantera power metal sleeve against the record inside it
Philip Anselmo had come up from Louisiana to take the microphone, and across the ten songs he sings high and clean at the top of a range he would spend the next decade wrecking on purpose, close enough to the Birmingham singer who had made that register the American measure of a metal voice that the comparison is the first thing reviewers reach for. Judas Priest released Ram It Down that same year, in mid May 1988, the exact day disputed too.
The title track of Power Metal is the clearest evidence the record carries, and it is the older meaning in under four minutes: a fast minor riff, a shouted verse, a chorus with no lift written into it, and a vocal that Fred Phillips, writing for Something Else Reviews, called Anselmo's best Rob Halford impression. In the judgement of the same writer the riffing at the end of that song is already reaching for what the band would do after 1990.
The sleeve is the last American document of a word that meant only how hard.
Proud to Be Loud closes side one and it was not written in Texas at all. Marc Ferrari, the guitarist of the Los Angeles band Keel, wrote it, played rhythm guitar on the Texas recording and produced that track, which drops a piece of Sunset Strip hard rock into a record whose front cover claims something a good deal heavier. The seam shows, and it shows in a useful place.
The rest of the album refuses almost every clause of the contract Europe was writing that year. Jerry Abbott's keyboards sit under the songs as furniture rather than as a second lead voice, nothing on the record is stacked into a choir, and the drums march and sprint by turns without once laying down the continuous double bass floor that Hamburg had already made compulsory. Nobody here is singing a fanfare.
The new singer had also thrown out nearly every lyric handed to him when he arrived and kept only Down Below, which leaves one track on side two carrying a previous singer's words while the other nine carry his.
The same year, the other meaning was being finished in Hamburg
Helloween put Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II out on 29 August 1988, and Dr. Stein went round the continent as the song that told every band on it what the phrase now covered, which was a tenor living at the top of his range, a chorus that resolves bright and a kick pattern that does not stop for the length of a side.
One calendar year carried both readings, in two markets, under one name, and the whole distance between them is the business of US power metal vs European power metal. The German record turned into a specification that other bands could be measured against and fail. The Texan one turned into a curiosity.
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
The company that posted the tapes back
The commercial story behind the sleeve is plainer than the musical one, and the band told it themselves. By their own account Gold Mountain, an MCA-distributed label, already had them under a signed contract, brought about through the guitarist Marc Ferrari's connection to Keel. Its executive Danny Goldberg found the material too heavy once Anselmo's vocals were on tape, and the drummer Vinnie Paul's account is that the company wanted the style altered until they sounded like Bon Jovi. They refused. The record came out on the father's imprint instead, with no promotion behind it worth the name.
That refusal is worth more than the tracklisting, because it prices the two words in the American trade at the end of the decade. A company looking at a Texas band in 1988 saw a rack for hair metal, a rack for thrash and nothing built between them, and the phrase the band had put on its own front cover named no shelf a distributor could point at. Europe had built that shelf and stocked it. America had not and never would.
Why the word walked off and left the sleeve behind
Within two years the band had a word of its own coming, and the pair on the sleeve were surplus to it, so what Pantera became after 1990 gets argued over by people who have mostly settled on groove and never once reach for the older phrase. The first four records went into a drawer. The fifth arrived with a different singer inside the same throat.
Europe spent the nineties hardening the phrase into a list of things a band could be caught not doing, and the chronology of that hardening, from the Hamburg records to the revival, is laid out in KaosMetal on power metal. By 1997 no German label would have printed those two words above a record that sounded like the Texan one, and no German buyer would have forgiven them for it.
What the album documents is a definition caught at the moment it stopped working. On any honest reading it is a heavy metal record of 1988 with a high singer, a speed metal title track and a hard rock song on side one, and it answers to the American sense of the phrase because that was the only sense on offer where it was made. The word went to Germany and did not come back. What stayed behind was a loud Texas album carrying somebody else's genre name on the front, which is a thing that happens to names and never to music.
