Pallbearer - Forgotten Days ALBUM REVIEW
Arkansas Doom Metal alchemists make heavy work of their fourth LP
Pallbearer have become fan favourites in recent years with their own colourful brand of doom metal. A formidable guitar sound, lumbering riffs, leavened by Brett Campbell’s expressive tenor. Albums like 2012’s Sorrow and Extinction and especially 2017’s Heartless showed them to be a doom band with a little more about them; a certain uplift, a deftness of touch that has allowed them to fly high above the more turgid tropes of the genre. The familiar ingredients are all here on Forgotten Days, but there’s a certain spark missing.
The titular opening track spelled warning signs for me. There is something in the descending guitar riff that feels jaunty and melodically awkward, a kind of goofiness that feeds unfortunately into the vocals. I appreciate the sentiments of confusion and despondency that run throughout the track but the results, a chorus of “Is this insanity? / Will they come to take me? / Who can I trust with tomorrow? / I no longer know myself” are a bit more basic and predictable than we have come to expect from this band. Musically, it all seems designed to signal a descent into madness and paranoia. At this early stage I find myself more concerned with whether they can arrest the descent into cartoonishness. Ever the masters of transition, Pallbearer improve things melodically in the second half of the track, and lyrically in its follow up ‘Riverbed,’ but it feels like they have their work cut out to recover from a shaky start to their fourth album.
The title of the third track, ‘Stasis,’ makes a great conceptual lens to understand the band as a whole. One one level, the word signifies inactivity, slowing down, stopping still. But this tendency towards stability, in all living things, is the result of untold chemical reactions happening all at once, all the time. Pallbearer’s main strength has always been in harnessing all of the broiling, unstable elements of the heaviest metal, always finding a way to maintain a beautiful equilibrium without dampening any of the genre’s most visceral qualities. The song comes at a moment of humoral imbalance in the album, and despite its proggy undercurrents, it does end up feeling slightly inert and not quite able to restore the system to working order.
A lot of the songs on this album are better in their latter half, and that becomes true of the shape of the record as a whole. Pallbearer are too good a band not to heave some real quality out of a twelve minute song like ‘Silver Wings,’ which ushers in the album’s second phase. It is masterfully paced, with a wonderfully intense intro leading into a slower, cleaner passage, before the textbook distortion returns, gargantuan and glacial. This track also marks the first moment on the album where the vocals truly begin to ascend. Campbell’s paeaning lyricism evokes ‘mysteries of 10,000 ages … Nothing more than sand / Washed into the infinite sea.’ The sonic landscaping, the way the vocals are harmonised to echo out into oblivion, all gives the track the feeling of Ozymandian fallen greatness. Doom metal’s answer to Blade Runner’s ‘tears in rain.’ They even manage to throw in some 80s style synths in the final third before nailing a devastating string-laden finish.
“Go away, dignity” moans the chorus of ‘Vengeance and Ruination,’ while the layering of the guitars uphold the high drama of it all. Despite my instinctive doubts in some aspects of this record, my faith in the chemistry between Campbell and fellow guitarist Devin Holt has never wavered. Their ability to weave two distinct, contrapuntal riffs together simultaneously is as strong as ever. Whether it’s the clean/distorted dialectic of ‘Vengeance and Ruination’ or the twin melodies of ‘Rite of Passage,’ one rumbling, one soaring, the results are always convincing. There’s a beautiful synthesis to all of Pallbearer’s instrumental work, and on these two tracks we see their signature doom metal reach a certain rock and roll swagger.
This is also true of the more upbeat intro to ‘The Quicksand of Existing,’ a title which sums up the lyrical themes of the album; a deep uncertainty in the foundations upon which we build our identities, the ultimate, unknowable decay and disappearance of all we know and care about. Despite the loftiness of these ideas the tools the band utilises on the track are not all that complicated. There’s a squelchy wah-pedal solo and a beautifully simple chord progression at the end that sees the band effectively unite grand concepts with quality metal songcraft. It is this balance, once so assured, that becomes tenuous throughout a portion of Forgotten Days, wherein lies its fault. It’s ultimately quite an unsettled album. I’ll like something the band is doing instrumentally, but the vocals and lyrics will fall short. I’ll be hooked into a song’s themes, but the execution is a little unfocused.
There’s a lot to like, but perhaps not quite enough moments where the big picture meets the sweet spot of immediate satisfaction. There’s very few bad songs, but there are also very few moments like, for example, the tectonic beat switches in ‘I Saw The End’ from Heartless or the lurching delicacy of that album’s title track. Pallbearer have become the kings of finding equilibrium where lesser bands default to chaos. By no means have they lost that title, but Forgotten Days makes uncharacteristically hard work of reaching stasis.
