Vulgar Display of Power is the sixth studio album by the metal band Pantera. Released on February 25, 1992, through Atco Records, it was the band’s second collaboration with producer Terry Date, after having previously worked with him on their breakthrough album Cowboys from Hell (1990).
The album was well received by both critics and fans, and is Pantera‘s highest selling album to date and would eventually be certified double platinum. It is often considered one of the most influential heavy metal albums of the 1990s. In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked Vulgar Display of Power 10th on their list of ‘The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time‘. Several of its tracks have become among the band’s best known, such as Mouth for War, A New Level, Walk, Fucking Hostile, and This Love.
The title of the album is taken from a line in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. (Priest: “If you’re the Devil, why not make the straps disappear?”. Girl: “That’s much too vulgar a display of power, Karras.”)
The band’s 1990 major label debut, Cowboys from Hell, demonstrated a change in their musical direction, from their 1980s material influenced by hard rock or glam metal bands like Van Halen and Kiss to a new similarity to bands like Slayer, Metallica and Black Sabbath.
The album’s cover is a photo of a man being “punched” in the face and was shot by photographer Brad Guice, who also shot the photo for the Cowboys from Hell cover. The band told their label that they wanted “something vulgar, like a dude getting punched”. The first version of the cover that the label brought to the band showed a boxer with a boxing glove, but the band did not like it, so the label produced a second version, with the bare fist. A popular rumor that was stirred up by Vinnie Paul was that the man on the cover was paid $10 a punch and was hit in the face a total of 31 (Rex Brown claiming 32) times to get the right picture. However, Guice dispelled this when he confirmed that the man, who was a hired model named Sean Cross, was never actually hit.
Vulgar Display of Power album spawned four singles. Mouth for War, This Love and Hollow were released in 1992. In 1993, the band released the fourth single, titled Walk, along with a number of EP’s featuring remixes of the song. In 1993, the Walk EP was released in Japan, but on May 16, 2012, the EP was made available to purchase digitally in the United States for the first time. The band also released music videos for Mouth for War, This Love and Walk, they were included on Vulgar Video and 3 Vulgar Videos from Hell. The music video for Walk was shot at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, where the band played the song multiple times to capture live video footage in front of fans.
On April 12, 2012, the unheard song “Piss” was released, which was recorded during the sessions for the album but never featured on the original album. Drummer Vinnie Paul had re-discovered the song while looking through old Pantera recordings. The music video for “Piss” debuted at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards, on April 11, 2012. The main riff from “Piss” was used in the song “Use My Third Arm” on the band’s following record Far Beyond Driven.
Tracklist:
- Mouth for War
- A New Level
- Walk
- Fucking Hostile
- This Love
- Rise
- No Good (Attack the Radical)
- Live in a Hole
- Regular People (Conceit)
- By Demons Be Driven
- Hollow
20th anniversary edition bonus track
- Piss
20th anniversary edition DVD
- Mouth for War (Live in Italy)
- Domination/Hollow (Live in Italy)
- Rise (Live in Italy)
- This Love (Live in Italy)
- Cowboys from Hell (Live in Italy)
- Mouth for War (video)
- This Love (video)
- Walk (video)
Pantera
Phil Anselmo: vocals
Diamond Darrell: guitars
Rex Brown: bass
Vinnie Paul: drums
Technical
Terry Date: engineering, mixing, production
Vinnie Paul: engineering, mixing, production
Howie Weinberg: mastering
Doug Sax: vinyl mastering
Brad Guice: photography
Joe Giron: photography
Bob Defrin: artwork
Larry Freemantle: design
Darrell Lance Abbott (August 20, 1966 – December 8, 2004)
Vincent Paul Abbott (March 11, 1964 – June 22, 2018).
