Pallbearer brought doom metal back from the dead. The gloomy subgenre born from the low-and-slow riffs of Black Sabbath had become redundant and tired by the early 2000s, as dozens of bands were replicating ad nauseam those stoner and fantasy vibes introduced by Ozzy and co. 30 years earlier.
Seemingly everywhere you looked, you’d find a band with pot-smoking wizard imagery. Even so, doom remained a popular genre, but when the unknown quartet from Arkansas announced itself in the early 2010s with albums Sorrow and Extinction (2012) and the Billboard-charting Foundations of Burden (2014), the game changed.
Pallbearer’s melancholic brand of funeral doom dragged the subgenre into the 21st century. What lead vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell, bassist Joseph D. Rowland, guitarist Devin Holt and drummer Mark Lierly do best is face life’s banalities and inherent struggle head on. It’s definitely not high-fantasy escapism or sweet leaf worship like much of doom of the time.
“It’s quite the opposite,” Campbell says. “The subject matter of our music is typically concerned with the darker elements of human life and experience. I guess that’s doom-y. But it’s essential to what we are. It’s drawn from life — the things we felt we needed to talk about in our own lives or our own reflections on the world around us.”
Pallbearer’s latest offering, Mind Burns Alive released May 17, carries on this tradition.
“Maybe we could fly, but we never learned to grow our wings,” Campbell croons on the opening track “Where The Light Fades.” Then, in a lyrical turn more depressive than biblical, he adds: “Maybe heaven’s waiting, but we will never know from so far down.”
Sonically, Campbell describes Mind Burns Alive as a “wide-open-sounding record,” meaning there’s more space in the mix than the typical the-louder-the-better approach.
“It’s more atmosphere-focused than a lot of our previous stuff,” he explains. “Doom as a genre is known for being very sonically dense and thick and syrupy, which is rad. This is more open. There’s a lot of head room in the master. It’s not insanely loud. It’s not brick-walled. It’s got a lot of air in it. That’s intentional.”
Pallbearer loves prog, too, which is why Mind Burns Alive is more King Crimson than Black Sabbath. Hear it for yourself when the band plays at the Gothic Theatre on Saturday, July 13 alongside Inter Arma and The Keening.
‘We’ve never fucking had a song about a wizard’
Pallbearer has never fretted about shaking things up, which is what is most endearing to fans. But that tendency for change has also left some perplexed since the group got together in 2008, to the point that Campbell has come to expect some grumblings. The latest full-length has been no different.
“I saw some comment online that said, ‘I miss when Pallbearer would sing about wizards,’” he recalls with a laugh. “We’ve never fucking had a song about a wizard. We haven’t had one single wizard song. We don’t write about fantasy and never have. That’s not our thing.”
Even including metaphorical “fantastical imagery,” like the ethereal white reaper that appeared on those early album covers, is becoming a thing of the past for Pallbearer.
“We use that less and less as time goes on,” Campbell says. “The way we’re wired, we take the music very seriously and we want to have a real meaning behind it.”
Going back to the band’s first 2010 demo, Pallbearer always stood out from its peers. What doom metal band has the guts to include a cover of Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” as one of its first three publicly released songs?
Growing wild
Of course, the four musicians behind Pallbearer have changed quite a bit since then, both personally and musically. But Campbell points out a throughline.
“The core idea is still the same as it ever was, which is just to push forward. Even when things look down, you have to keep pushing forward,” he says. “I had forgotten how unhinged that demo sounds. It is kind of crazy that it’s the same band. But we’ve always had progressive aspirations and this desire to push ourselves as hard as we can, looking for new sounds and approaches.”
Pallbearer might have led the doom revival of the 2010s, but the Little Rock outfit has never been beholden to anything other than themselves.
“We’ve been following the trajectory we set for ourselves. We don’t know what our next album is going to be, but we know it’ll be different than the last one, and that’s the way we’ve approached it from the very beginning,” Campbell says. “As time has gone on, people have come to expect that we’re going to do something different each time.”
It still all stems from Black Sabbath, but “the children of Sabbath have grown in a bunch of different directions,” he adds.
“It’s really hard to define what specifically it is,” Campbell says. “It probably means different things to different people.”
ON THE BILL: Pallbearer with Inter Arma and The Keening. 8 p.m. Saturday, July 13, Gothic Theatre, 3263 S. Broadway, Denver. $25
