Rise of Pallbearer

LITTLE ROCK — It’s a little past midnight earlier this month at The White Water Tavern in Little Rock and the place is just about full. The crowd is here to see doom metal quartet Pallbearer play songs from its 2012 album Sorrow and Extinction.

The band has been at it for about a half hour now and the members seem as if in a collective trance. Singer-guitarist Brett Campbell, bassist Joseph D. Rowland and guitarist Devin Holt sway and crouch over their instruments intently, Holt’s and Rowland’s faces often obscured by their longhair as they bang their heads, Campbell’s soaring vocals swirling around in the middle of the chaos. Drummer Mark Lierly wails on his kit, pushing the beat forward incrementally but with force.

At the front of the crowd, near the edge of the low, small stage, without much of a buffer between the band’s stacks of speakers, one feels the full force of the volume and weight of the songs. It’s a physical thing, like a gale, and it’s also mesmerizing. The crowd looks on in approval, some swaying or nodding in time with the song, and somehow the structural integrity of the gracefully aging tavern remains intact amid the aural assault.

This form of metal is glacially slow and bone-crushingly heavy. Imagine early Black Sabbath, only slower and with more distortion. While thrash or other forms of metal music might emphasize pure speed, doom metal is in no hurry to get where it’s going.

Pallbearer, based in Little Rock, became doom metal heroes with the release of Sorrow and Extinction, the band’s debut LP, in February.

“The record’s a triumph,” crowed Pitchfork.com’s Brandon Stousy in his review, and the album landed on 2012 best-of lists ranging from metal magazine Decibel and Spin, to those metal mavens over at National Public Radio. The band also toured constantly, hitting both coasts and the Midwest, and tomorrow begins the Winter Rite North American Tour with Enslaved, Ancient Wisdom and Royal Thunder in Columbus, Ohio.

For a band whose album is called Sorrow and Extinction, which is filled with titles like “Devoid of Redemption,” “An Offering of Grief” and “Given to the Grave,” the members of Pallbearer prove to be a lighthearted bunch during an interview as they knock back a few pitchers on the patio at Vino’s in Little Rock one chilly evening in December.

“Watch This Is Spinal Tap,” laughs Rowland when asked to describe a typical Pallbearer performance.

And they are all unabashed fans of Jim “Dandy” Mangrum and Black Oak Arkansas.

Together since 2008, Pallbearer came from the same scrappy, central Arkansas underground metal scene that produced bands like Sea Hag, S+++fire, Dead Bird and Rwake, all of whom are thanked in the liner notes to Sorrow and Extinction.

“This year we’ve gotten to see hundreds of bands,” Rowland begins, “but still, S+++fire, at the old Juanita’s, played the heaviest show I’ve ever seen.” There were no gimmicks, no crazy props, he says, it was just music made with passion.

“That’s why we started,” Campbell, with his long, wavy beard and widow’s peak poking from beneath the hood of his jacket, adds. “We wanted to have a band that was along the lines of classic metal but is still progressive and with an incredibly heavy aesthetic.”

It was a modest three-song demo from 2010 that first got Pallbearer noticed outside central Arkansas. Once the tracks went online, the buzz began.

“It went kinda viral, I guess,” says a smiling and bearish Rowland, 28. The demo contained not only earlier incarnations of “Legend” and “Devoid of Redemption” that would later appear on the album, but a cover of “Gloomy Sunday,” a song with roots in Hungarian folk that was made famous when Billie Holiday recorded an updated version and also became an urban legend when suicides were reportedly tied to the song.

“That seems to be people’s favorite thing from the demo,” says Holt, 23, who grew up in Greenbrier and who has been playing in bands since he was 14. “That demo was mostly kinda for us to document what we were doing.”

It ended up paving the path to a record deal.

Campbell had recorded a track, “Silent and Completely Overcome,” with the band Loss, who were on the respected indie metal label Profound Lore, based in New Hamburg, Ontario. After hearing the vocals, Profound Lore owner Chris Bruni bugged Loss singer Mike Meacham for more information on Campbell and Pallbearer.

“I was pretty much left speechless,” Bruni says on his reaction to hearing the demo for the first time.

Christopher “CT” Terry of Rwake, perhaps Little Rock’s most pre-eminent underground metal band, says that on a trip to New York he was asked about the demo by Fred Pessaro, a writer for the Brooklyn Vegan blog.

“They were getting lots of offers on the strength of that demo,” Terry says.

There were negotiations with another label, but the group ended up with Profound Lore.

Still, it would be a while before a full-length album saw the light of day. When it came to recording Sorrow and Extinction, in a case of life imitating art, Pallbearer weren’t going to rush.

Five songs in 48 minutes. That’s what makes up Sorrow and Extinction. Opening with nearly three minutes of plaintive, carefully picked acoustic guitar, the record erupts with life on “Foreigner” and cascades through the next four tracks, each one meticulously layered and constructed. It is at once complex, cathartic, intense and crushing. Amid its grooves, which owe as much to the progressive rock of bands like Camel (a favorite of Rowland and Campbell) as traditional metal, there is also a dark and damaged beauty.

The album was recorded by the band and Chuck Schaaf at Schaaf’s studio in Fayetteville. It took nearly a year.

“We spent the time necessary to make it sound as good as we could,” Campbell, 25, says, his speaking voice surprisingly deeper than his singing voice, which is something akin to a young Ozzy Osbourne and stands apart from much of the harsh, growling vocals of many metal bands.

“I don’t think anyone goes into anything wanting to make a throwaway project,” says Rowland, who grew up in Bloomington, Ind., moved to Arkansas 10 years ago and attended University of Central Arkansas in Conway with Campbell, who grew up in Bryant. “We wanted to make something that is timeless. I want to make something that, years later, I can go back and say, ‘Yep, that was a worthwhile venture.’”

Terry of Rwake had a good feeling about the album, which was engineered by his old bandmate Schaaf.

“I’m not surprised. They really took the time and it’s probably the best thing I’ve heard Chuck do. They didn’t rush anything and they knew what they had. They have a lot of atmosphere and they were able to capture it. They really took it to town.”

Sure, there may have been a few sessions when the band traveled all the way to Fayetteville only to, um, imbibe a bit too much during weekend recording sessions (“We were getting too destroyed during recording,” Rowland laughs),rendering their work useless when heard in a more lucid state the next day.

“We all also just really fell in love with Chuck,” Holt adds. “He’s just such a good dude to talk to and the temptation was to just party and hang out and not get much done.”

Pallbearer’s bandmates certainly don’t seem to mind a good time, but they also come across as world-class perfectionists.

If a track like “Foreigner” took just a few hours or so to write, the group labored over others, like the epic “Offering of Grief,” which took almost a year to piece together.

Campbell handles the bulk of the lyric writing, with help from Rowland, and the words definitely tilt toward the mystical, shrouded-in-fog, Dungeons and Dragons set; there is death, long journeys and funeral pyres. There are often great instrumental gaps between verses, giving the songs room to breathe and live. “Given to the Grave,” the climactic album closer, uses just 30 words as it roils and builds into something almost cinematic.

Amidst Sorrow and Extinction’s gloom is an undeniable strain of hope.

“Too many bands get too focused on trying to sound evil or dark,” Rowland says, while Sorrow and Extinction is meant to reflect the peaks and valleys of life, and not just blistering rage or melancholy.

“Sadness is something everyone experiences,” Campbell picks up, “to have a way to confront that and turn it into something useful... the album is supposed to reflect a journey.”

The group recorded Sorrow and Extinction with drummer Zach Stine, who left on good terms not long after the album was finished. Schaaf stepped in and toured for part of 2012 before he, too, had to step down just before the band’s biggest tour.

The band quickly recruited Lierly, 32, a Little Rock native and veteran of the local punk scene (he started playing with Soophie Nun Squad when he was 11, and first toured at 14).

“The first song I ever heard off the album was ‘Devoid of Redemption’ and thought... that’s awesome,” Lierly says. “I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to local metal, but I bought the album on iTunes and thought it was great.”

A Pallbearer gig with Lierly’s punk band R.I.O.T.S. (“it stands for Ranch Is On The Salad,” Lierly jokes) on the bill soon followed.

“That was the first time I’d seen them and it was awesome.”

With Schaaf leaving, Rwake’s Terry soon got in touch with Lierly, putting out feelers to see if he’d be interested in touring with Pallbearer. Lierly was enthusiastically onboard.

“I teach drums and I’d actually taught some of the Pallbearer songs to my students,” Lierly says.

“It was like this unreal synchronicity,” Rowland adds, noting that Lierly’s personality and drum skills made for a perfect fit with the other three Pallbearers.

With Sorrow and Extinction nearly a year old now, there is talk of returning to the studio for more recording, but the band’s dance card is full for at least the first half of this year. Along with the North American Tour, label owner Bruni says the band will head to the Roadburn Festival in Holland and then work in some European gigs.

And, no surprise, Pallbearer isn’t rushing their process, even though they say they are working on new material.

“We’re pretty self-critical and meticulous,” Rowland says.

Back at White Water, the show is coming to an end. The band has plowed through “Gloomy Sunday” and it doesn’t appear any life was lost. There has been no real Spinal Tap moment, although Rowland did have to rush into the crowd to grab a backup Fender bass when his original started acting up.

Pallbearer lurches into “Given to the Grave,” the show’s final song, and soon Campbell and Holt are kneeling over the array of pedals that manipulate the sounds of their guitars, fiddling with knobs and bending their strings, coaxing streams of distortion from their instruments. Rowland and Lierly are facing off in rhythm section abandon. This continues for some time; the wail of the guitars and the massive beats are like a madness somehow barely controlled, a beautiful, angry, hopeful squall of white static and abandon unleashed on a cold and unsuspecting night.