By Andrew Bansal
In an effort that has matched and superseded their stellar 2012 debut LP ‘Sorrow And Extinction’, Little Rock AR doom metal quartet Pallbearer released their sophomore full-length ‘Foundations Of Burden’ on August 19th via Profound Lore Records, an album decidedly more dynamic and powerful than its predecessor and an apt representation of the group’s heightened state of creativity, highlighted with conviction under the masterful ear of Billy Anderson. On August 21st, I spoke to vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell to discuss the making of this album in detail, among other things including touring plans. Enjoy the insightful conversation below.
Brett, it’s good to have you on Metal Assault for an interview. First of all, the new Pallbearer album sounds amazing, so congratulations on creating such a great record. It’s your second full-length and previously you released ‘Sorrow And Extinction’ in 2012 which was very successful in every way, whether it be from the fans’ perspective or the critics. Did the success of that album have any impact on how you approached this album?
Thank you so much, man! Well, whether or not the debut album was going to be commercially successful, we were happy with it when we finished recording it. I thought the album would have been creatively successful, regardless of whether or not it reached an audience at all other than a small number of people that were listening to us around here locally, our friends and stuff. But when it comes to writing this new album, there wasn’t really much of a reaction to the positive press and the general response. We were writing the next batch of songs. The stuff that I wrote on there, some of it was written late, within a few months before we recorded, and there were songs that we started writing around the time when we were doing the Sorrow stuff. So, some of these songs took us 2-3 years to finish writing. Sometimes I work really slow and at other times it’s fast. So no, there wasn’t that much thought. We were just composing songs as usual. If anything, we were probably trying to make the songs be more dynamic for live purposes, to make things more interesting live, because the first album does have a tendency of being on more or less the same tempo throughout the whole thing. So we were trying to vary things a little bit.
Right, I was actually just going to say that. The new album is certainly more dynamic in that sense and the previous one hit its groove and kind of stayed there for the most part. That must have been something you’re satisfied with on the new album, bringing that positive change in the songwriting.
Yeah, that was something that we were trying to do, just challenge ourselves a little bit. I mean, I kind of like that the first album has that consistency and it was intended that way, but after touring on that stuff for a couple of years solid, we want to add a little more dynamics just to make things more interesting for ourselves, to keep ourselves challenged from a songwriting perspective, take what we learned from writing and playing the older songs and try to expand it a little bit.
Production-wise as well, I feel that on this album the heavier guitars and bass are sounding much more powerful, while the cleaner guitars and vocals are more melodic. Of course, Billy Anderson must have had a role to play in that, right?
Oh he did! We worked together and we had an idea of what we were wanting to do as far as guitars. He was somehow able to put up with us (laughs). We ran him through the paces, recording an unheard of level of number of guitar tracks. Going into it, I was wanting to use a little cleaner guitar for the basic guitar parts to get more string clarity. The first album was recorded with basically this apocalypse level of gain, and it kind of missed a lot of the subtleties, chord progressions and stuff with that method. So we tried to use more variety of tones and then stack them on top of each other to make it heavier. It’s kind of deceptive, the album sounds really heavy but for the most part it’s a shitload of layers of moderately distorted guitars.
He’s such a busy guy in what he does, and a lot of bands tend to work with producers like that who have a big repertoire of past work, but such producers are working with multiple bands at the same time in a lot of cases. So, did that happen with Billy at all or was he totally focussed on your album when you were working with him?
He never really has a day off, and it was pretty interesting because he had just got done with the Agalloch record, and immediately to ours to focus on Foundations for a solid month while we were there. I don’t remember if he had a day off or not, but right after he left he went to record the new Acid King album. So, I don’t know when that dude finds time to sleep! But yeah, he was fully focussed on our stuff. We all were. We were living in the studio, not showering. It was great.
It was almost like you were on tour with your own album.
Absolutely. It was almost like twilight zone after a while, or like groundhog day. We would go to sleep and wake up, and it was the exact same thing as yesterday, just recording tracks and tracks and tracks of rhythm guitars, layering and all that, everyday for a month! But it was worth it, even though it was a lot of work.
Vocally as well, I think this album is better and the melodies are a lot stronger. Is that something that you worked on more this time, or was it just your self-improvement that brought it through on its own?
Well, the vocals for the first album were recorded very differently than this one. For that one it was just me in my room singing into my computer. There was no studio, there was no one else involved. It was pretty hilariously DIY, in the sense that I don’t know anything other than the basic stuff about recording. So yeah, that was a big difference. For the new album we were actually in a real studio with an engineer. It made me a little comfortable to begin with, the fact that I wasn’t having to sing, record, edit everything and worry about all that at the same time. As far as the performance and the actual melodies go, it was just natural. The melodies come first and then I’d write lyrics to them. Whatever melody reveals itself in the music, I find the words within the melodies in a lot of cases. It kind of works for some of Joe’s stuff too, because I improvise melodies when we practice. The songs that Joe wrote lyrics on, a lot of those are based around what we improvised in practice. So we have the basic melodies and rhythms and then we just kind of hack away at them until we figure out what the content is, I suppose.
Right, and obviously you have long 10-minute plus tunes in your albums. I find it interesting when I ask this to bands because a lot of them have different ways of writing and recording these songs, like I was talking to Mike Scheidt of Yob the other day about this and he has a totally different way of doing it. How do you guys compose these songs, in small parts or all at once?
It really just depends on the song. Some songs, like I was saying earlier, take a day or two and others take two years. It’s all about when inspiration happens, and just keep working on it until its done, until it feels like it’s the way the song is meant to be. Usually when I’m writing, I’ll have an initial idea and come up with three or four pretty strong sections that can flow, may be not so well but they are a logical stream of musical ideas. And then, over time I’ll figure out the transitions between them, may be take a break and then come back to the ones I came up with the day before and then try to figure out where the song is going from there. Sometimes I can’t figure out where the song is going for a month, and just come back to it every once in a while until the rest of the song comes into my head. But then a few songs that worked out much quicker. ‘Foreigner’ off of the first album was pretty much written in two days in two halves. ‘Foundations’ the title track from the new album kind of came that way too. I just sat down, and there it was! I mean, I’m just saying that because in reality I spent four hours of something working on it, but some songs just appear without really having to work on them too hard, and then others require more effort, like ‘Vanished’ which I worked on for two years, trying to figure out where it was trying to take me.
Interesting, man. And finally, now that the album has come out, what plans do you have for the rest of the year touring-wise?
We’re going to be on the road for the rest of the year, pretty much. We’re leaving September 3rd for Europe and we’ll be there touring with Yob for five weeks. Then we’ll be back here for five days and then we’re going to the East Coast for another five weeks. So yeah, we’re doing Europe and then pretty much the whole damn United States between now and December.
That’s awesome, man. All the best for that and hopefully we’ll see you out here in LA soon.
Yeah! We had a really good show last time we were there on the Enslaved tour in February 2013 and I’m looking forward to getting back out to LA.
Related: Pallbearer ‘Foundations Of Burden’ album review
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Pallbearer North American tour dates with Tombs and Vattnet Viskar:
October 17 Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
October 18 Lexington, KY @ Cosmic Charlie’s
October 19 Champaign, IL @ High Dive
October 20 Madison, WI @ The Frequency
October 21 Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick
October 23 Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
October 24 Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
October 25 Montreal, QC @ Il Motore
October 26 Boston, MA @ Great Scott
October 27 Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus
October 29 Philadelphia, PA @ Black Box
October 30 Baltimore, MD @ Metro Gallery
October 31 Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506
November 1 Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
November 2 Tampa, FL @ The Orpheum
November 5 Houston, TX @ Fitzgerald’s Downstairs
November 7 Austin, TX @ Fun Fun Fun Fest
November 9 Dallas, TX @ Three Link