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Narrowing down the most influential metal bands of all time is, to me, really pretty easy. You've got Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, Slayer, and Pantera... Those six. Pantera is the most recent of these bands to break ground. And while I prefer their previous album, Cowboys From Hell, a tad more, this is really the album that cemented the band's impact on the genre. The main change that this release affected on heavy metal was pretty easy to see; it made screamed vocals okay for mainstream metal. Vocalist Phil Anselmo is (mostly) an unhinged madman on this album, and his vocal performance is half of the draw here. The other half is Dimebag Darrell, who's guitar work is simply sublime here. His riffs and solos are charged with raw energy, aggression, and the man's own brand of soul. If nothing else, this album represents how irreplaceable Dimebag was, but ultimately, this album does represents so much more. The songs on this album are what have stuck with people, almost all of which have become heavy metal classics. Pantera's aggression being a main selling point, it makes sense that most of the songs on here (A New Level, Fucking Hostile, Rise, By Demons Be Driven, and of course, Walk) are machismo personified. All this seething anger and hostility is the aspect that is most copy/pasted by the bands influenced by Pantera. Few bands have managed to pull it off with anywhere near as much authenticity as Pantera did here. And while it's pretty easy to criticize all the crappy knock-offs (cough cough FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH) Pantera's songs here are too good to write off. And on one final note, one other thing the posers didn't take note of was the fact that two of this albums best songs, This Love and Hollow, were actually ballads in heavy metal casing. I feel like these two songs are high water marks of the heavy metal ballad. It's hard to think of many ballads that come close to the quality of those two songs, which feature the most profound lyrics on the album. In closing, not only did Pantera fully realize the groove metal genre with this release, but also released an undisputed metal classic. Not anything a true metalhead should go without.