08032014 - Pantera "Projects In The Jungle"

A lot of people talk shit about this album without having even heard it, and that's just unfair. Of course, this is not Pantera sounding like people remember them from their later albums, but so what? Bands change. Deal with it. Of course, one very notable difference is the vocalist, and air raid siren Terry Glaze obviously sounds nothing like his replacement, but he delivered some classic screaming on this power metal album that owed a lot to bands like early Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe and Judas Priest. "Like Fire" is a good example of a song that sounds like a cross between the latter two, with a riff lifted straight out of "Shout at the Devil" and a guitar solo reminiscent of something from "Defenders of the Faith", and "Heavy Metal Rules" has both Quiet Riot and Accept in there! The keyboards on "In Over My Head" are just about the furthest you can get from anything most people would associate with Pantera, but a band has to start somewhere, right? And both the title track - with its "Creatures of the Night" meets "Fistful of Metal"-isms - and a couple of other songs hint slightly towards what would come later. All in all this is a record that bears its influences on its sleeves, and, in my book, ends up sounding all the better for it.