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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Arkansas' doom-metal quartet Pallbearer, led by
guitarist Devin Holt and vocalist Brett Campbell,
tried to revitalize a genre that was rapidly becoming a self-parody but
the double-LP Sorrow And Extinction (20 Buck Spin, 2012)
only yielded mixed results, with the
stately Foreigner (12:23) a bit too derivative of Black Sabbath
and the various attempts to mix folk and ambient elements a bit too
amateurish. What certainly stood out was the melodic and emotional skills,
something usually missing from the genre.
A cleaner, sharper and slicker sound on
Foundations Of Burden (Profound Lore Records, 2014), featuring
new drummer Mark Lierly, went for the mainstream.
The poppy pomp Worlds Apart has more in common with the worst excesses of Rush than with the doom classics;
and the second half of Watcher In The Dark is basically a slow-motion cover of your favorite pop-metal hit.
The problem is that the result is neither doom nor pop nor anything of substance, as the tedious litany Foundations amply proves.
To their credit, the way they develop and end the
funereal march of Vanished (something that we have heard a thousand
times) is original and moving.
After the EP Fear and Fury (2016), that contains a cover of
Type O Negative's Love You to Death,
the album Heartless (2017)
further simplified their sound, and moved it away from doom-metal, towards
pop-metal.
I Saw the End is reminiscent of
Rush's prog-metal without the technical skills
and of Queensryche's melodic bombast.
The grandiloquent Broadway aria of the eight-minute Lie of Survival
The 12-minute Dancing in Madness begins with a slow, romantic, languid
guitar melody worthy of latter-day Pink Floyd,
and eight minutes into the song there is even a folkish solo of acoustic guitar,
before the operatic ending.
Some of the guitar solos sound more obnoxious than exciting, and could therefore
be removed, the singing is rather bland, and the rhythm is pretty much always
a stately midtempo. There are obvious limits to their formula, particularly
evident in the clumsy and predictable title-track and in the slow, meandering
13-minute A Plea for Understanding with its quasi-soul refrain.
Forgotten Days (2020)
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