“I had a series of dreams where there was a ghost that was continually visiting me and it was always the same ghost in each dream. It was leading me to this place where there was something hidden there,” Joseph D. Rowland recounts over the phone from his home in New York City.
“Sometimes, instead of the ghost leading me in the first person, I was the ghost and I was going on the journey towards whatever it had to show me. But eventually, once the album was done, I didn’t have the dreams anymore.”
While he admits he never found out exactly what the mysterious apparition was leading him towards, the Pallbearer bassist speculates on whether “that’s manifested some way in the album itself”.
Listening to the album in question, 2014’s Foundations of Burden, it does seem like prime real estate for otherworldly spirits. As has been noted by many critics, who’ve heaped endless praise on the album, it’s a brooding, introspective, cathartic tome.
While the album is markedly different from its predecessor, 2012’s Sorrow and Extinction, it continues the Arkansas group’s streak of critical acclaim, one that’s seen them billed as one of the leaders of a new wave of heavy music, colloquially known as “hipster metal”.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a spate of bands who’ve come into prominence since the early 2000s and who’ve received critical acclaim from outlets normally known for preferring indie rock acts, such as Pitchfork, and have thus attained a cross-genre appeal with non-metal audiences.
As The AV Club noted in their review of Foundations of Burden, the way Deafheaven’s Sunbather “remade black metal into something richly emotive, melodic, and transcendent is one of heavy metal’s big success stories of the past couple of years”.
There’s only one catch to The AV Club‘s summary – black metal had always been richly emotive, consistently melodic, and transcendent. Just listen to Dissection’s seminal Storm of the Light’s Bane, which came out in 1995, or Sacramentum’s Far Away from the Sun, released a year later.
In fact, the more one actually dissects this whole “hipster metal” thing, the less legitimate it seems. After all, the bands deemed “hipster metal” rarely converge stylistically. They encompass everything from the black metal of Deafheaven, to the sludge of Kylesa.
If anything, it seems the term is just another case of metal fans cordoning off their area. It’s such semantic palaver that Pallbearer refuse to associate themselves with, though they’re certainly not blind to the fact that metal has seemingly attained a newfound mainstream respectability.
“I think it’s a combination of metal being appreciated by a wider spectrum of people and also being given a little bit more credibility than it used to be,” says Joseph, “because I think there’s this conception that metal is just rockist music with screaming and no value or depth to it.”
“On the flip side of that, people think of like, ’80s hair metal or something, just being vapid and not really having any sort of deeper meaning to it at all, music about excess. So take that and their conception of that is slowly changing.”
“I think a lot of the most successful artists now, and I don’t mean that in a monetary way, but the ones that I feel like are making the most interesting, creative music, are the ones that are combining elements of metal with other kinds of music.”
Then Joseph drops the bomb on us: “Recently, I was having a discussion with Devin [Holt, guitarist], he was telling me that he’s not interested in the future of metal, he’s interested in the future of music and I thought that was a really excellent way of looking at it.”
“I think we’ve reached a point where metal is becoming such a large umbrella, where it covers so many vastly different types of music and pulls influences from all other ends of the spectrum of music in general, that I think that’s why it’s starting to see wider acclaim and more and more people are getting into it.”
Joseph didn’t wait for some cooked-up movement in order to get into heavy metal. Instead, a small portable radio played the role of gateway drug. “I was in a pretty strict religious household growing up and the only thing that I was really allowed to listen to was classical music,” he recounts.
“But as any teenager is wont to do, I ended up finding a college radio station based out of a town maybe an hour away from the rural area where I was living. So I would listen to it on headphones at night when I could get it to tune in well enough.”
“This was before the days of being able to use the internet to find music. That was my first introduction to Smashing Pumpkins and Alice In Chains and stuff like that. So that was where I started to initially delve into heavier music and music outside of the spectrum of stuff that was ‘acceptable’, so to speak.”
Hungry for new music, Joseph started mail-ordering CDs through the web. “There was this point where I was just consuming anything that came my way and I had to sift through to figure out what was good and what was bad. But that was my introduction to listening to bands like Neurosis and ISIS and stuff like that,” he explains.
However, despite his ravenous appetite for music, starting a band was not the next logical step for Joseph. “It’s not something I wanted to do rather than just out of the love of playing music. I don’t think any of us in the band ever had any sort of pretences about being in a band as a professional musician.”
“We all just grew up loving playing music and there was never any goal to tour Stateside, much less internationally. But I’ve always loved playing music and writing music and this is the most recent incarnation of that.”
That said, the band still hold themselves to a strict standard. As far as Joseph is concerned, Foundations of Burden is a “better” record than Sorrow and Extinction. How does he quantify something so subjective?
“I think that’s just kind of a philosophy on our part. We just don’t want to tread water or end up rehashing the same thing that we did before. I think whatever you put your mind to, whatever your craft may be, you always want to continue to ascend, get better at it, do something better than you did last time, learn from your mistakes.”
“Foundations of Burden is a byproduct of that. We wanted to take some of the things that we would’ve liked to have done differently on the first album and ensure our continued growth as musicians and working together as a band.”
“There’s definitely the purists out there who were disappointed we didn’t write another album exactly like the first one… but I think if we wanna continue to grow as artists there’s no sense in making the same thing over and over again. That’s really boring and I don’t think anyone really wins then.”
Joseph’s words leave the door open for Pallbearer to ascend even higher as one of heavy music’s most interesting bands, an ascension that will will not only impact the future of metal, but the future of music.
Pallbearer will play Dark MOFO festival this June, in addition to a series of headline dates around the country. For more details head over to the official Pallbearer website.
