The ticking of the clock can be brutal. It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years since PANTERA’s mighty Vulgar Display Of Power first blew our young minds open and became, at least for me, the soundtrack of a good few years of my life. Really, I can’t overstate how much this and its mighty follow-up album Far Beyond Driven were essential parts of the development of, well, me. Sure, I didn’t quite turn into the tough guy that a 15-year-old me thought I would when cranking ‘Walk’ on my walkman, but, still. New levels of confidence and power and all that.

Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the disc that really put Pantera on the map (sure, Cowboys From Hell started the ascent, but that one was always about half filler), we get a reissue of Vulgar. And it’s a nice concise reissue, not bogged down with too much rubbish, just presenting the album in a remastered form (which doesn’t mean a whole lot to the average listener), with one bonus song and an extra DVD featuring the album’s three videos as well as a live show from Italy from the Vulgar tour cycle.

But let’s get to the meat of the matter: the album proper. And, man, this still sounds as fresh as it ever did, only reason it’s not registering as a solid 10 here is a couple songs that come close to filler and, more importantly, the spectre of the band’s next album hanging over this one, making this look like a bit of an overproduced and underperformed (although maybe more concise) beast. That almost comes down to personal preference though (I give Far Beyond Driven a 10, easy, and am happy to take on anyone who challenges that; but, I do know some folks who like Vulgar better. I saw them live on the Far Beyond Driven tour cycle and, man, you’ve just never seen so much confidence and hunger on a stage).

So, here, shit starts hard and fast and magical: ‘Mouth For War’, ‘A New Level’, and ‘Walk’. Has any opening trio of tunes been as amazing as this since? Three huge groove-laden majesties of metal. Classics. Then on to ‘Fucking Hostile’, always just this side of joke/parody song, but mainly just this side of absolutely fucking amazingly perfect, and ‘This Love’, which gave some extremely-needed breathing room. But when it picks up the pace… as heavy as ‘Fucking Hostile’, in a whole other way.

So the band blows their load hard there, with the first five songs being total classics. Here’s where things get a bit less classic, with ‘Rise’ being a great ending to the first half of the album, although not quite as classic as those first five. But on to the last half and you get three songs that are really, really good but not quite as memorable or classic: ‘No Good (Attack The Radical)’, ‘Live In A Hole’ (quick, hum the verse), ‘Regular People (Conceit)’ (quick, tell me anything about this song). Then, a couple more powerful classics to end off: ‘By Demons Be Driven’ (fuck yeah on that ending riff, just timeless) and the amazing ‘Hollow’, this album’s ‘Cemetery Gates’.

The thing that’s getting Pantera fans all hot and bothered here is ‘Piss’, an until-now-unheard track from the Vulgar sessions. Bits of the song ended up in Far Beyond Driven’s ‘Strength Beyond Strength’ and ‘Use My Third Arm’, but the song as a whole isn’t as heavy as that sounds, instead being a bit of a lightweight Vulgar track, the band members themselves sounding lukewarm about the track in the press going around right now, so it’s hard to get too excited about it, really. But, it’s a fully finished Pantera song circa ’92, so, you know… we all get a bit fanboy for a bit, but, really, this reissue is all about the 11 songs that make up Vulgar Display Of Power, which, combined, have done so much for metal and so much for so many of us.

The band was on the rise at this point in their career, a rise which culminated with their next album; in this era, they were completely unstoppable, and anyone who was adopting their music as their personal soundtrack was pretty unstoppable too. It’s a crazy world and the clock ticks, always so brutal, and everything changes all the time and it gets kinda hard to keep up. So, please, just remember this one thing: Pantera released two albums that you need to spend serious time with in your life. This is one of them.