Originally posted on vh1.com here.
Phil Anselmo’s 10 Coolest Non-Pantera Projects
Down, Superjoint + beyond: how the hardest working beast in extreme music keeps going.
by Mike McPadden 9/19/2015
When you mention Philip Hansen Anselmo, most heavy music fans known him primarily, if not exclusively, as the vocalist of Pantera.
Alas, Anselmo’s time as the front-maniac of those metal titans is just the beginning of how New Orleans’ loudest and proudest son has impacted music—and so much more.
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Phil Anselmo continually creates, shapes, promotes, and inspires extreme rock—along with films, art, festivals, and other media—in an ever-evolving variety of vehicles and guises. And all of Phil’s undertakings, rest assured, definitely fall under the classification of “extreme.”
In 2015, Anselmo’s Superjoint group embarked on their first tour in over a decade, and his annual Housecore Horror Festival is gearing up to once again soak Texas with sonic and cinematic boodle-letting. So now is a perfect time pay tribute to this tireless one-man metal mayhem factory with a salute to ten of his coolest, and heaviest, projects.
10 Metal Grasshopper
To simply listen to Phil Anselmo’s ferocious singing voice is to, understandably, perhaps miss out on how hilariously good-humored he also happens to be. One performer who picked up on that side of Phil is comedian Dave Hill. Together, they created Metal Grasshopper, a web series in which Anselmo schools Hill in the uproariously definable art of being, at all times, metal.
9 Boxing Insider
hil Anselmo’s vocals pummel listeners like an onslaught of prizefighter combination punches, and to watch him in performance is see clearly how the sweet science impacted Phil’s stage presence. Anselmo comes by this association way more than honestly: as a lifetime fight fan, Phil frequently speaks about the sport, and reguarly serves as a writer and correspondent for the industry’s bible, Boxing Insider.
8 Anton Crowley
Aleister Crowley aka “The Great Beast” was a world-changing British philosopher, occultist, multimedia artist, and champion mountain climber familiar to heavy metal fans through a multitude of venues, including Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr. Crowley” and Jimmy Page taking up residence in the old sorcerer’s castle on Loch Ness.
Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966 and three years later authored The Satanic Bible. Ever since then, both the book and/or some representation of LaVey’s chrome-domed, arched-eyebrowed visage have been as required fixtures in every budding headbanger’s bedroom alongside black-light posters, skull t-shirts, and Sabbath records coated with weed-rolling residue.
In creating a new high-concept persona, Phil Anselmo combined the two unholy icons as “Anton Crowley.” He’s used the name while playing guitar for death metal gore hounds Necrophagia, singing lo-fi black metal with Viking Crown, screaming in the name of Satan for Christ Inversion, and other undertakings as he so feels possessed by the Anton Crowley spirit.