By Andrew Bansal
Presenting material from their sophomore full-length effort ‘Foundations Of Burden’ which is being unanimously regarded as one of the best albums of 2014, Little Rock, Arkansas doom quartet Pallbearer are currently on a US headline tour along with support acts Solstafir from Iceland and Mortals from Brooklyn NY. Pallbearer brought their brand new set to Los Angeles to mesmerize a packed Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood on Friday December 5th. A few hours before they took the stage, I sat down with three-fourths of the band, Brett Campbell (vocals, guitar), Devin Holt (guitar) and Joseph Rowland (bass) to discuss the tour, the new album, doom, and lots more. Enjoy the conversation below.
This tour started a couple of days ago and you’re a few shows into it right now. How’s everything been going for you guys?
Brett Campbell: Having a blast, man. We’re really enjoying all of our tour mates and everything, and we’re all having a good time. It’s already been so much fun, hanging out with everybody at the shows and after the shows. We’ve known Mortals for a while and it’s great to tour with them.
Devin Holt: It’s a solid package.
BC: A very hard rocking package (laughs).
Right, and it’s just three bands, which is good for the audiences too because it’s not too much to absorb in one evening.
DH: Yeah, I hate going to a death metal show where there’s like, six death metal bands. By the time the headliner comes on, you’re so tired of blast beats. The bands on this tour are all different, so that’s kind of cool. It’s like watching episodes of three different TV shows or something. It’s nice to have a sampler of different things rather than a repetitive wing-eating competition or something like that, you know (laughs).
That’s a good way to put it. So, your new album came out this year and obviously you’re playing songs off of it on this tour. How are they translating live and how different are they sounding from what we hear on the album?
BC: They’re not really that different, man. We wrote these songs for them to come off live. They were intended to have a lot of energy and work well live. The only thing we weren’t sure about was the vocal harmonies that we put on the album, but for the most part they work. Over the course of the European tour we did, the Deafheaven tour several months ago, and the tour with Tombs that we just got off of, we slowly started incorporating harmonies into everything. But yeah, things seem to be working.
You’re coming here at the right them, then. You’re already in the groove with the new songs and we should be getting the best possible show tonight.
BC: Hopefully, yeah! Including the first leg of this tour and Europe, we’ve been going for nine weeks, which is the longest we’ve ever been on the road. We had three weeks off and now this is our fourth show on this leg. The first one was kind of shaky but after that we’ve just been right back into the groove.
Awesome. From what I’ve read, the fans have been really enjoying this album, probably more than the first one. It must be a satisfying feeling when people want to hear your new songs more than the older ones.
Joseph Rowland: Yeah it’s really cool, specially for us. We didn’t have that many songs to play for the longest time (laughs), so it’s nice to double our repertoire and for people to be excited to hear the new stuff and when we play the old stuff too. It is nice.
BC: Even the people that come up after the show that say they like the first album more, no one says that they don’t like the new one.
JR: Well, there was that one guy in Finland who told us that he “found it uninspiring”(laughs).
BC: Oh yeah, and then there was this guy in Prague who came up to the table and he was like, “One thing I notice about American bands is, everyone’s too stoned.” He probably said that because all of our songs are slow and long. But then I was like, why did you come to the show?. If Yob and Pallbearer sound “too stoned” to you, you’re really not at the right show (laughs).
Have you also considered playing the whole album live?
DH: It would be hard to do the song ‘Ashes’. We don’t have the necessary equipment to do that live. But it may happen some day.
BC: Plus, there are certain songs off of the first album that if we didn’t play, people would be really disappointed, I think. When we just had ‘Sorrow And Extinction’, we were playing the entire album straight through. We did that several times, but now, since we have more to choose from, we can dictate what kind of flow we want for each set depending on how we feel and just going with the vibe of the night. But it’s fun having more stuff to choose from, because we were playing most of the songs from the first album for a year-and-a-half or more before it even came out. So, by the time that album came out we were already ready to play new stuff. But then we toured on that for like two years. So we’re pretty glad to have more to choose from, and at the same time we still love playing stuff from the first album.
JR: I feel kind of reinvigorated playing the old stuff, actually. We worked so hard learning the new songs that going back to the old songs we’re rediscovering certain things about them that are enjoyable to play live, and that’s been really cool.
Do you feel like a big change between the old and the new songs when you play them in a set?
BC: I don’t really notice anything. The old stuff is probably a little easier to play. There’s a lot more complex stuff going on in the newer songs. But it’s all fun to play.
You said earlier that you were playing songs off of the first album much before it was released. Was this album also like that?
JR: Not this time. We recorded the album in February 2014, over the course of a month, and then it was out in August.
BC: And for the first album, we took an entire year. We’d go up every three weeks or once a month and work on stuff for a weekend. The studio that we recorded at was more than two hours away from where we live, so schedules had to line up between everybody.
DH: And we partied like idiots. The guy who did the record for us, Chuck Schaaf, eventually joined the band on drums. So we obviously hit it off really well with him and we’d drink a little bit, so it became ridiculous. We’d stay up all night, changing things, and then waking up the next day and having to change it again.
BC: Everything sounded so awesome at night, and then the next day that feeling disappeared (laughs). We had the songs written a long time before we recorded them too. But for the second one, we were working on stuff even in the studio, certain bits and pieces. Some of the songs were actually started around the same time as the batch of songs on the first album. So some of them were two-and-a-half years in the making, and then others were written just in the preceding months before recording. So, there was more studio experimentation on this one.
This year, there’s been so much of doom metal that’s been in prominence. Do you think it’s been a good time for you to come out with this album? You’ve been able to ride on that wave.
BC: I guess so. People seem to be really interested in doom right now.
DH: But where we’re from, it’s always been all about doom metal since I’ve been going to metal shows from the age of 14.
JR: It’s not really like a trend for us at all. In the Little Rock metal scene, that’s the only kind of music you really grew up with.
BC: Growing up like that, listening to bands like Rwake, it was pretty natural to be a doom band. Something about Arkansas makes doom bands. Very depressing, basically (laughs).
Related: Review + Photos: Pallbearer Headlines The Roxy
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Remaining Tour Dates:
December 12 Boise, ID @ The Shredder
December 13 Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
December 14 Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater
December 16 Lawrence, KS @ The Riot Room
December 17 Minneapolis, MN @ Triple Rock
December 18 Chicago, IL @ Subterranean
December 19 St. Louis, MO @ Firebird