Sep. 06, 2006 - Issue #568: Sex in the City

Distant Replay

Ian Dillon discusses Pantera's The Great Southern Trendkill

Cerberus may be a Calgary-based band, but you’d be excused for thinking that it’s a local act. After all, the band has been playing a slew of shows in Edmonton in an attempt to grow its reputation here, as well as in its hometown.

For Cerberus singer Ian Dillon, the work of the late great Dimebag Darrell and his former Pantera bandmates is what most inspired his musical career. He chose 1996’s The Great Southern Trendkill as his Distant Replay album of choice.

Emerging out of Dallas, Pantera became arguably the most enduring act to rise from the ’90s metal scene. Often unfairly pegged into the nu-metal category, which is home to pretty well every band with a throaty male vocalist that rose up in the last decade and a half, Pantera instead was a band that balanced metal darkness with a real southwestern musical sensibility.

Just like the title of their previous smash album, Cowboys From Hell, suggested, the band had just a little bit of rattlesnake country music in its dark, devilish metal. For Dillon, it was this album that really symbolized his youth.

“This album brings back the first memories of 40s of Big Bear, bush parties and pot,” he says. “Rock-solid song after song, from the initial first deep breath of Phil (singer Phil Anselmo) through to the passion of Dime (Darrell) in ‘Floods’—God bless his soul—this album never stops with the groove-oriented thrash-metal style that is Pantera.

“The musicianship is amazing, the breakdowns of deadly riffs, bridges that are like a face being dragged over concrete, the total display of ignorance and hatred. No other album has inspired my musical direction more than Trendkill. I was raised on Sabbath and Pantera from an early age, but never did the music mean more to me than at the point of enlightenment you reach in your early teens—fuck the world for all its worth.”

While Trendkill was not Pantera’s most popular album, it might go down as its most experimental. Songs like “Floods” and the two-part “Suicide Note” epic brought the band to its darkest point ever. Eventually, Anselmo’s love of all things dark would clash with the Abbott brothers—guitarist Dimebag Darrell and drummer Vinnie Paul—who wanted to take the band in new directions. Pantera splintered in an ugly mess, with the Abbotts forming a new act, Damageplan, in 2003.

Tragically, Dimebag Darrell was shot and killed, along with three others, by a crazed fan at a club in Ohio in 2004. But, back to Dillon’s take on Trendkill:

“You would find me at any party, being that drunken asshole who’s taken over the stereo and screaming and spilling beer everywhere. It was the first metal album I could connect with; it wasn’t like the generic crap from the nu-metal scene that seemed to be the new trend. This music had real passion with a real message.”

You can check out samples of Cerberus’s music at the band’s new website, www.cerberusmetal.com.

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