Pallbearer Explore A Different Kind of Heaviness on New LP - Rock and Roll Globe (2024)

The Encyclopaedia Metallum website classifies Little Rock, Arkansas-based Pallbearer as Doom Metal.

Asked about the sub-genre and Pallbearer’s place in it, guitarist, singer and co-songwriter Brett Campbell is sanguine.

“I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve accepted it,” he said in a recent Zoom interview. “I understand how hard it is to describe what we do as a band just because we aren’t really adherent to any one genre convention. So I’m fine with being called a doom band but it’s not the only thing that we do.”

Campbell prefers the term “heavy” as being more evocative, less constricting.

“Heavy can be a lot of things,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily mean hammering a riff. Heavy can also be emotionally heavy. I think that’s something that we typically are.” But he would prefer Pallbearer be a genre unto itself and that less stratification of music happened in general. “I understand why genres exist. If you’re telling somebody about a new band or any old band they’ve never heard, saying, ‘well, this is jazz’. If they called Ornette Coleman a doom metal band, they’d be very confused when they listen to it.”

That someone in a “doom metal” band would talk about Ornette Coleman is part of what makes the band so appealing. Campbell’s influences go past traditional source material. While he name-checks classic metal bands like Black Sabbath and Dio and doom pioneers Candlemass, he also mentions grindcore, ‘70s Kosmische Musik bands Kraftwerk and Cluster, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, Sun Ra and more.

Pallbearer has just released its fifth full-length album, Mind Burns Alive, four years after its predecessor Forgotten Days. There is a certain spaciousness to the new music in contrast to the earlier slab, a lightness creeping in among the overcast soundscapes. But rather than being a development of the band, the six songs were actually written at the same time as the Forgotten Days material. The plan had been to record and release the new music as a surprise while touring for the earlier album as an opportunity to showcase different aspects of the band. The songs that would end up on Mind Burns Alive “had more subtlety, you know, more dynamics and kind of air,” says Campbell. “If Forgotten Days is all fire this would be more of a night-time calm, more moody and mysterious.”

The pandemic nixed that idea but Campbell now thinks it was for the best. “The extra time spent with the material and the things that we learned and had the opportunity to do on the production and engineering side like schooling ourselves,” he said, “had we not been able to do that, the record would have been, I would assume, dramatically different than what it ended up being. I’m very happy that we had the chance to do it right because I feel in terms of conception to execution on a sonic level, and even like subtle arrangement level with the performances, I think the record is the closest thing that we’ve ever gotten from the kind of imagined version of the songs to the final cut.”

The change in feel is like flying a plane through various densities of cloud cover. Campbell says that that while the finished product came quite close to the initial demos, attention to the granular was key to their success, small but ultimately significant changes to things like chord inversions or drum patterns.

“The difference between an okay song and a great song I think is often in the details,” he says.

There is also a new texture for Pallbearer, a saxophone solo by band friend Norman Williamson on “Endless Place”. “That was in the very late stages of recording,” recalls Campbell. “We were at our neighborhood bar, because we all live really close to one another, having some beers, and somebody suggested what if what if we got Norman to play a solo at the end? And we just looked at one another and were like, yeah, it makes sense. So he came in a few days later and knocked it out, nailed it. For a song about being trapped inside yourself, so to speak, becoming more and more desperate, that solo elevated that feeling of desperation and mania. That really makes that last section hit harder.”

VIDEO: Pallbearer “Endless Place”

Pallbearer was founded in 2008 by Campbell and bassist/co-songwriter Joe Roland, who had played together in other bands in Little Rock’s small but fertile “heavy music” scene, and guitarist Devin Holt, moving through a series of drummers before Mark Lierly (whose brother has since done covers for the band) joined in 2012, the lineup consistent to the present day. Campbell attributes the longevity to the fact that, “We just like playing together. We’re friends outside of the band and we hang out outside of the band. So it’s not really like a business. When you’ve been in a band together for as long as we have—Joe and I have been playing together since 2005—you develop a musical rapport and an instinctual dialogue. We kind of know what to expect from one another in a good way and so you can play to each other’s strengths and know what each person is capable of and understand the kind of directions that each person is likely to take given a certain set of musical parameters. And that’s really useful for composing.”

The process of composing is a collaborative one, whether a loose idea from Campbell, Roland or, occasionally, Holt fleshed out in jam sessions or tightening up an already concrete demo with the band’s aforementioned attention to nuance. Both Campbell and Roland write the lyrics, something the former find quite to be “a very grueling process because one of my favorite things about creating music is the inherent abstraction and the ability to communicate these kind of ineffable concepts and feelings without having to put those into words. But the lyrics are just as important, if not the most important, element of solidifying the abstraction to a listener.”

The results—dark, solemn, doleful, slow-moving, deliberate—are very much in keeping with the band’s name, a moniker they could not believe had not been used before given the finite number of gloomy single words in the English language.

“Joe came up with it,” says Campbell. “The name is the hardest part of being in a band. It just fit the atmosphere of the material. Joe’s mother at the time was dying so that word probably came up in some capacity either in dialogue or in his thoughts. So it just seemed to be the right name.”