DEATH RATTLE

The next Pantera reissue, their final output, "Reinventing The Steal". This album was released just before I left high school, and it certainly had a different effect on me at the time than their previous stuff did. You see, all of their albums leading up to "The Great Southern Trendkill" had been released before I actually took an interest in them and before I'd really discovered heavier metal like this. I think I missed the initial release of that album by about six month or more, so as a kid when I discovered them, I think somewhere in my head, subconsciously I put all their older work up on some kind of pedestal automatically, and instantly regarded them as classics. The fact that I'd never really heard anything so aggressive and something that I connected with so strongly as well was certainly a large contributing factor. So when RTS was unleashed it didn't hit me with quite the wallop that the older stuff had. As an adult though, when I rack up all of the their 2nd era releases, this one would have to be one of my favourites. Simultaneously walking that wire of accessible by the mainstream, while still retaining a pretty anti social approach, behind TGSTK, this was probably their darkest album. A degree of irony also has to be observed though in the track "We'll Grind That Axe For A Long Time". Certainly a response to the wider speculation by the media and fanbase about inner turmoil within the group, citing Phil's alienation from the rest of the band, they were to split less than 18 months later.