Pallbearer - Sorrow and Extinction
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It’s probably appropriate that I took an eternity to write this review. Like all great doom—a classification under which they most certainly fall—Pallbearer take their sweet time working into your skull. The Little Rock, Arkansas quartet traffic in a low and slow metallic pummeling that fits somewhere between the sub-glacial pace of funeral legends Skepticism and the more modern approach of labelmates YOB and Loss (on whose 2011 LP Despond Pallbearer vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell made a cameo). It’s what more conservative types would call “traditional”, and what the more dramatic among us would tag as “epic”. They’re both right, considering Campbell’s dead-on Wino impression makes a strong case for the former and the five lengthy, drawn-out excursions on the band’s debut, Sorrow and Extinction make a case for the latter.
Yes, Pallbearer trudge, as all doom bands must. But the key emotion that drives them is not despair, and it’s not even sorrow. No, the key to Sorrow and Extinction is that second word. It’s the void- the bleak absence of everything. The expanse between vocals, drums, guitar, and bass. That is where this record makes its heaviest impact, where it lays its sonic burdens on our weary ears. Its riffier moments make their admittedly strong cases—the Sabbed-out mid-section of “Devoid of Redemption” and the incessant melodic line of “The Legend” come to mind—and they are certainly buried under suffocating, subterranean collapses of amplifier obsidian. But let me ask you, what’s more frightening: Being crushed instantly by a cascade of stone, or being left to wander through infinite caverns to die alone?
It’s the abyssal nothingness Pallbearer carve out that makes this such a harrowing journey. Nothing sells this harder than closer “Given to the Grave”, where the album’s production lends itself to the vacuous distance between echoing clean guitar and soft-touch drumming. By the time the song’s central riff crashes in, it’s almost a reprieve from the weightlessness of everything that preceded it. Doom records are rarely so black and white; even when they go clean, there’s that sense of foreboding, the sense that this salvation won’t last long. Pallbearer reveal nothing until the blow lands, and when it does, it’s like someone handing us a respirator before crushing our windpipe.
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HEAR SORROW AND EXTINCTION
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqLQlL-sSJ0
Pallbearer – “An Offering of Grief”
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