After fumbling slightly on their last record, the doom apostles recover their grave, soaring majesty on an album that find a new way forward by refining their past.
Doom metal creeps. Half a century since Black Sabbath released Paranoid, arguably the form’s ark of the covenant, most doom bands still sound somewhat like the original, each with assorted refinements. Yes, doom has occasionally splintered into smaller and slower sects, like the lugubrious “funeral doom” and glacial “drone metal.” But consider the progress of hip-hop in roughly the same time frame: While hip-hop has created its own global ecosystem, teeming forever with wild new mutations, doom is a solitary old oak, steadily growing at its own oblivious clip.
A decade ago, Pallbearer emerged from Arkansas as promising apostles of doom and purveyors of this stubborn beauty. On their first two LPs, especially 2014’s magisterial Foundations of Burden, they paired the kind of compulsory hooks that made Sabbath stars with the seeming belief that every song could be a 10-minute hypnotic wash. Pallbearer synthesized doom’s best elements into a refulgent melancholy, sparkling as it sulked. They wobbled, though, on Heartless, their 2017 parting shot for longtime label Profound Lore. As though trying to prove how much they’d grown during their tenure there, Pallbearer did too much too fast, flitting from would-be hits that missed to panoramic psych-rock that bored.
But on their international debut for Nuclear Blast, a fabled clearinghouse for some of the world’s most popular metal bands, Pallbearer—smarter, sharper, and ostensibly sadder now—again plod doom’s time-worn grooves. Their fourth album, Forgotten Days, is both a return to mighty form and a new way forward for a band perpetually poised at the edge of wider success.
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