Cowboys From Hell 3CD Deluxe Edition

About a week ago I had this urge to play Pantera’s “Cowboys From Hell” in my car on the way to work, and after I slipped the pink CD into the player, felt a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the playing is fantastic and I love the songs, but for some reason, I felt that something was lacking, especially when you compare it to their follow up “Vulgar Display of Power”. Cowboys was the album where singer Philip Anselmo, guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, his brother, drummer Vinnie Paul and bassist Rex Brown, really found themselves.

This morning the “remastered” Cowboys album landed on my desk. Now usually people tend to let out a long laboured sigh as they already own the album, so why get another copy. After all, it’s just another cynical cash in, right? Wrong. When Pantera first really made their mark (I’m not talking about the earlier “glam” efforts by the way) with Cowboys From Hell, I remember standing in front of the video wall at Rock City, totally shell shocked. Metallica were popular, and I liked their stuff too, but when I heard Dimebag’s guitar work it was utterly liberating. It was like some Norse god had just smashed me around the head with a vicious looking Dean guitar with a triumphant war cry of “WAKE UP BOY!! THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE!!”. Needless to say, the vapid original release of Cowboys didn’t quite have that same effect.

So, on the way home in the car an evil little grin spread across my face as I fed my CD player this new remastered epic. “Please god, don’t let it suck”. I have to say 200BHP of VTECH and “Cowboys From Hell” go very well together! It was the same Cowboys, but it wasn’t. I was so relieved that there was a difference, but how much? Once home, played the original, then the remaster, then the original, then the remaster, repeat x5. This new edition is a marked improvement that’s for sure.

Same track listing, same order of songs, but it’s clearer, it’s got a bit more of a swaggering weight to it, and anybody who can’t hear the difference needs to stop shelling out lots of money for over priced headphones and the like because quite frankly, you’re not getting the most out of them. So now I’ve rediscovered a new joy of listening to my favourites from the album, “Cowboys From Hell”, “Heresy”, “Cemetary Gates”, “Domination”, “Medicine Man” and it’s awesome conclusion of “The Art Of Shredding”.

So should you buy this new edition? If you’ve ripped all your songs to mp3 without a care at a slightly lower quality, then maybe you’re not going to care too much about the quality. If however you’re like me and you own the original on CD and Vinyl and you actually like your music to sound like it has a purpose then you might want to head out and take a look at this, especially as the story doesn’t end there.

Alongside the remastered album there’s also a CD of unreleased and rare live performances from the "Cowboys From Hell" tour, complete with expletive laden interludes during the course of the set from Anselmo, and in the Ultimate and Deluxe Edition, you get a third CD of unreleased demos for the album.