‘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