Doom metal creeps. Half a century since Black Sabbath released Paranoid, arguably the form’s ark of the covenant, most doom bands still sound somewhat like the original, each with assorted refinements. Yes, doom has occasionally splintered into smaller and slower sects, like the lugubrious “funeral doom” and glacial “drone metal.” But consider the progress of hip-hop in roughly the same time frame: While hip-hop has created its own global ecosystem, teeming forever with wild new mutations, doom is a solitary old oak, steadily growing at its own oblivious clip.
A decade ago, Pallbearer emerged from Arkansas as promising apostles of doom and purveyors of this stubborn beauty. On their first two LPs, especially 2014’s magisterial Foundations of Burden, they paired the kind of compulsory hooks that made Sabbath stars with the seeming belief that every song could be a 10-minute hypnotic wash. Pallbearer synthesized doom’s best elements into a refulgent melancholy, sparkling as it sulked. They wobbled, though, on Heartless, their 2017 parting shot for longtime label Profound Lore. As though trying to prove how much they’d grown during their tenure there, Pallbearer did too much too fast, flitting from would-be hits that missed to panoramic psych-rock that bored.
But on their international debut for Nuclear Blast, a fabled clearinghouse for some of the world’s most popular metal bands, Pallbearer—smarter, sharper, and ostensibly sadder now—again plod doom’s time-worn grooves. Their fourth album, Forgotten Days, is both a return to mighty form and a new way forward for a band perpetually poised at the edge of wider success.
Forgotten Days hinges on “Silver Wings,” the 12-minute saga at its center. A quintessential throwback, it is an encapsulation of most everything Pallbearer have done well, like the tangled solos that animate the middle or the crawling tempos that thrill as they build. During the song’s back half, Pallbearer harmonize over kaleidoscopic synthesizers, perfectly fusing their love of Pink Floyd with the intricate singalongs of AOR. “Silver Wings” ponders human frailty and impermanence—or how time grinds “even the greatest of triumphs/To nothing,” as they sing in unison during the last verse—by creating a formidable monument to that very notion.
More important than this epic, though, are its bookends. Aside from a twinkling curio on Foundations of Burden, “Stasis” and “The Quicksand of Existence” are the two shortest songs in Pallbearer’s catalogue, clocking in at four minutes each. It’s as if producer Randall Dunn challenged them to squeeze their grandeur onto a seven-inch single. The brevity works. Pallbearer fit a magnetic riff, a compelling hook, and at least one curious instrumental section into each song. Nothing is missing; instead, you gain a sense of how catchy and immediate Pallbearer have always hoped to be, beneath the monolithic solos and militant repetition. How would an entire Pallbearer album so pithy work?
The rest of Forgotten Days actually trends that way. Pallbearer never allow indulgence to stand in the way of a song’s urgency here, digging into these grooves without getting stuck there. The title track moves like a mudslide, viscous at the core but relentless as it plows downhill. Brett Campbell’s refrain about the instability of self-doubt—“Is this insanity? Will they come to take me?”—clings to the riff as though it were the only solid ground in sight. The irrepressible “Vengeance & Ruination” is a reminder that the Allman Brothers’ Georgia and Eyehategod’s New Orleans are only a day’s drive from Pallbearer’s home of Little Rock. Finale “Caledonia,” a farewell to youth’s innocence, is a languorous beauty, with keyboards seeping from the cracks between the pensive guitars. When Pallbearer lift into the chorus, you picture them grinning despite the song’s emotional weight, marveling at how good it can feel to share these blues.
Campbell and Joseph Rowland wrote Forgotten Days about family loss. Rowland is finally reckoning with the death of his mother nearly a decade ago, just before Pallbearer became a breakthrough band, and the self-medication that followed. Campbell has recently watched his grandmother succumb to the cruelty of Alzheimer’s. These eight songs grapple candidly with these woes, but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.” That is a longtime hallmark of the best doom, too, from Sabbath through Candlemass and now to Pallbearer—staring directly into the dark and squinting to find the light. Forgotten Days convinces you to do the same.
Buy: Rough Trade
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