album review: Down--Over the Under

It's been a rough couple of years for Phil Anselmo. The singer was hooked on methadone following the 2003 breakup of heavy metal giants Pantera, after 15 years together. While touring with the short lived and poorly received Superjoint Ritual, Anselmo publicly lambasted his former bandmates from the stage, to the dismay of the group's loyal fans. In 2004, disaster struck: Pantera guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott was shot and killed while performing with a new band, prompting Anselmo to rescind his recent comments about the fallen musician. "He's like a brother to me," Anselmo said, changing his tune in lieu of the tragedy. Then in 2005, Anselmo's New Orleans home was flooded during Hurricane Katrina. On III-Over the Under, the third album from long-running New Orleans metal collaboration Down (their first in five years), Anselmo tries to come to grips with his missteps and misfortunes and, perhaps, push forward.

With Down, Anselmo's strained, soulful delivery taps into a sorrow rarely heard in his other bands, where unbridled rage took center stage. Now reportedly clean, he evinces frustration about his former drug habits on "Never Try" and "N.O.D.," admitting, "L.S.D. ain't what it used to be for me." Gone is the chest-thumping bravado; in fact, Pantera is never channeled here, lyrically or musically. Rather, the sludgy, often bluesy, mid-tempo songs are evocative of the primary bands of Down guitarists Pepper Keenan and Kirk Weinstein, who play for Corrosion of Conformity and Crowbar, respectively.

Fortunately, Anselmo's melancholy themes never keep the album from rocking hard. It's on "I Scream," the album's most straightforward, blistering metal jam that he touches on his broken relationship with Dimebag in the month's prior to the guitarist's death: "Fallen leaves/from the same family tree/regret is all that's left," he sings.

In "On March The Saints," a beautiful, boozy slab of southern hard rock, he decides there's no sense to be made of Katrina and nothing to do but soldier on and start anew. Yet for all his talk of rebirth on Over the Under, Anselmo stops short of repentance. He prefers to see himself as a victim. "All scorn me," he snarls on "I Scream," bemoaning what he calls "witch hunt blame."

Down
III-Over the Under
Warner Music Group