Pallbearer
& Baroness
“Signals Sent from the Smoke of a Life Ablaze”
It’s no surprise that music made to help performers and listeners process anger, sadness, pain, or trauma seems to be growing in prevalence and power every year. Anyone paying attention to the world is likely to need it, and modern metal’s many genres are all honed to capture some of those emotions and help us work with them. (Have a look at the book and film, Rez Metal, about the Navajo uses of metal, if you need examples.)
In Manchester on 22 November two bands with uniquely powerful takes on metal’s cathartic potential took to the same stage. On paper, Pallbearer and Baroness might not sound that different. Both are from the slower, deeper realms of metal (sludge and doom) that make up a large part of the scenes in Arkansas and Georgia where each band started out. Both now embrace a huge dynamic range so that long spells of songs sound more spacious and delicate than metal was ever supposed to. And both have famously used their music to process trauma. But they’re interesting to see together because of contrasts in how that processing of emotion sounds and feels: far from being similar, they show opposite sides of how metal works.
I interviewed Pallbearer last month, for a project, in its infancy, called Why Metal Matters. Their new album, Mind Burns Alive, contains some of my favourite music of 2024 (alongside Ulcerate’s latest release). Like most people, I don’t always embrace changes of style in bands I love. But Pallbearer’s slow evolution has been different. Where I loved their early albums primarily for their soundworld, there’s something about the new material that just seems to burrow deep into my head. It speaks to me with a directness that little other music does. This might be partly about the relationships between lyrics and music. Where the words are dark and seem to be full of despair, the music rings with hope and determination. Surprising turns to major harmonies echo into silences that few bands would have the courage to hold. They never fail to draw beauty from the ugliness or to give the impression that even the smoothest, most sparkling surface hides treacherous depths. So much care has gone into tone and production that a modern Pallbearer song is like bathing deep in complex emotions where sadness can almost sound ecstatic. Californian slowcore band, Duster, have been acknowledged as an influence, and when I first heard Mind Burns Alive it triggered a memory of a phrase used about Duster’s first album: the songs work “as a blanket to hide under or a cape to soar with”. I think that fits Pallbearer even better.
There were several other things that made me want to interview the band. One was seeing forums and journalists consistently talk about their music as if it were medicine or therapy – “taken as required” in difficult times or “there for me when life took me down some rough and unexpected roads”. I read an interview in which the bass player, Joseph Rowland, referred to the music as “taking the burden” of difficult emotions, and I wanted to learn more about that idea. Another reason for the interview was that I usually write about history, and Pallbearer’s music obsesses over the fragility of memory and the ways in which we can’t know even our past selves. This comes in part from the band’s own trauma, as well as their proximity to alzheimers and addiction. The artwork for the new album is even a photo from a series called Falling through History. Yet another reason was the ways the live experience of the band has been written about. A New York Times article from 2017 argued that
In the midst of the sonic dismay [of doom metal], Pallbearer works like contractors hired by Black Sabbath and HGTV to renovate doom’s underground bunker, by installing major-scale emergency exits and unexpected, lovely chord changes that function as skylights.
That article showed ways in which Pallbearer’s musical language was “churchy” and described the band’s crowds “with eyes closed and arms upraised, swaying like megachurch attendees coming down with the holy spirit”.
This was pretty much as it was in Manchester: an audience completely transfixed on performers who themselves had an intensity of focus that looked and sounded like they were living every note. No mosh pit. No jumping around. Just deep togetherness in the shared point of focus. There was even a solitary lighter held aloft in the crowd, as though it was 1996, while Brett Campbell (in photos 1 & 3 below) sang, achingly beautifully, of “Signals sent from the smoke of a life ablaze”. But I think it’s the middle one of these photos, of Devin Holt (his mood as deep as the 7th string on his baritone guitar) that most captures the feel:
The night opened with Silver Wings, from the previous album, Forgotten Days. I loved, in the interview, hearing Brett talk about the novels that inspired this song’s interrogation of memory’s failures and deceptions. These were the Viriconium series by M John Harrison, particularly the third and strangest of the books. Brett talked about its weird evocation of a city having memory, and referred to its mood as a “sense of the world decaying” with what’s left being like “dust on the skeleton of time and place”. After delving into the book, to be immersed in the live experience of the song - with its lumbering riffs, twisting solos, and lavishly-harmonised lyrics about the grind of time - was an experience almost too hypnotic for me to focus on taking photos.
Where Pallbearer look inwards, and work over their ideas in ways that feel like the musical expression of deeply personal thought processes (an introvert’s vision of catharsis?), Baroness release it all in swirling, extrovert energy. The most talked-about event in Baroness’s career was a tragic coach crash twelve years ago, which left two band members with spinal injuries so severe they could no longer play. The band’s driving force, guitarist and singer John Baizely, narrowly avoided having his arm amputated. The open letter he wrote six weeks later is celebrated for its honesty and insight. He described the sound of the coach’s brakes failing, the panicked shouts of the driver, the realization of a desperate situation as he met the driver’s eyes, with the coach mid-air, and then the memory of his body flying “like a missile” into the windshield.
There was one moment in the crash that cut me deeply... It was, specifically, the moment I impacted with the glass. In that barest heartbeat of a moment, I came face to face with the infinite... I looked into a cold, unreflective mirror. It was the dark, silent, dispassionate logic of the end. I realized in that moment that life can be seen as a light switch: "on" or "off". When the moment passed and I heard the screaming, felt the pain, and tasted my own blood, I was overcome with joy. I was ecstatic to be back amidst all that chaos and horror because it was alive and real.
The letter describes the subtle space between despair and hope, and lauds music as the means for expressing the nuanced and conflicting emotional tides in which “true life” occurs.
I have used this time, stuck inside my own head, to consider the importance of music and Baroness in my life. I can say, after nearly 6 weeks of reflection, that I feel more resolute and passionate about our music than ever. I have come to realize the importance of time in this particular equation, that is, I have none to waste and none to spare. There is no better moment than now, broken and in physical stasis, to devote ourselves more fully towards our art than ever.
The band’s subsequent music has dealt with the trauma of that moment. It hasn’t done so with either the interiority or directness of expression found on Mind Burns Alive. Baroness’s music can be deeply destabilizing and disorienting (just listen to the stupendous guitar solo on Last Word, the first song of their Manchester set, and surely my favourite solo of last year) but it’s always bursting with cathartic energy - there’s more than a little of that sense of joy crashing into chaos that Baizely’s open letter conjured. I had a completely new appreciation for Baroness after seeing the energy pour out on stage in Manchester. Lead guitarist, Gina Gleason, was a whirlwind of technicality put to soul-shredding purpose. The crowd exploded with energy too – suddenly bouncing nearly as much as the band. Here are some photos that try and capture this:
This was a thousand times more raucous than Pallbearer and their crowd, but there’s no sense in which it was a more intense expression of emotion. These were just completely different styles and strategies for expressing catharsis and dealing with trauma. Today’s metal bands have hosts of ways to help us work with anger or sadness or any other emotion we can think of - there are hosts of different ways of seeing the starlit sky from the bunker. But these two sets were illustrations of contrasting musical methods for letting a quiet inner darkness sing, and sending it to soar, on waves of distortion, till it resounds through a thousand other minds.
The Pallbearer interview is still in Canva, before I add an introduction to it (without that, this edit starts and ends pretty abruptly). Once it’s done, I’ll embed it on this page, but here’s the link to the Canva file if you’d like to see some a little of it.
