Part IX
By then the end of the Eighties was rapidly approaching, and metal was again becoming a jaded form of music. Every new pop and thrash metal band sounded exactly the same, and of the old ones only a few remained. Motley Crue and Guns n' Roses still ruled the music world along with Metallica, in the absence of Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. The thrash world was quickly dying as bands were repeating everything done before, and Slayer, Megadeth, and Metallica had all slowed down and softened up on their approach in different degrees, which in turn propelled their sales and sent Metallica's "Black" album into an unbelievably long stay on the charts. Death and doom metal had already revived, but speed and glam needed a savior.
Pop metal didn't get it, but thrash metal certainly did, courtesy of Pantera. Pantera (originally a glam metal band) practically revolutionized thrash metal by popularizing an approach that had first been exploited and created by the (unjustly) unrecognized Exhorder. Speed wasn't the main point anymore, it was what singer Phil Anselmo called the "power groove." Riffs became unusually heavy without the need of growling or the extremely low-tuned and distorted guitars of death metal, rhythms depended more on a heavy groove, and vocals became a mixture of snarls and sharp screams, which all revived thrash for the Nineties. But pop metal was to suffer another fate: death at the hands of alternative metal.
Alternative metal had its roots on Neil Young's Crazy Horse, and even before with bands like the Ventures and the Velvet Underground, but the true innovators were Living Colour, Jane's Addiction, and Faith No More; the first an eccentric mixture of heavy metal, jazz, blues, rap, funk, hardcore, and a good dose of black culture; the second a band that borrowed heavily from the Seventies and developed its own unique sound with Perry Farrel's high-pitched squeals. As for Faith No More, its members mixed every existing type of music available to them and fused it with their second singer Mike Patton's bewildered screaming to create masterful albums, a style adopted and developed later by Scatterbrain, Mr.Bungle (Patton's side project) and Mindfunk. These bands were quite successful before the alternative metal explosion that was to occur, and obscured other bands that were stirring up a commotion, such as the hardcore-influenced Sonic Youth, the hyperkinetic Fishbone, the Irish Therapy?, and Seattle's Melvins, Tad, and Mudhoney. Of course, there was also Mother Love Bone, but the band never quite hit fame, despite its outstanding music.
