Pallbearer fit a magnetic riff, a compelling hook, and at least one curious instrumental section into each song. It’s as if producer Randall Dunn challenged them to squeeze their grandeur onto a seven-inch single. 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. More important than this epic, though, are its bookends. “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. During the song’s back half, Pallbearer harmonize over kaleidoscopic synthesizers, perfectly fusing their love of Pink Floyd with the intricate singalongs of AOR. 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. 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.įorgotten Days hinges on “Silver Wings,” the 12-minute saga at its center.
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.īut 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. They wobbled, though, on Heartless, their 2017 parting shot for longtime label Profound Lore. Pallbearer synthesized doom’s best elements into a refulgent melancholy, sparkling as it sulked. 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. A decade ago, Pallbearer emerged from Arkansas as promising apostles of doom and purveyors of this stubborn beauty.
0 kommentar(er)
