Photo by Ebru Yildiz

2012 was a year of beginnings and endings for Pallbearer and Baroness. 

Pallbearer released their debut album, Sorrow and Extinction – a colossal landmark in doom metal. Singer and guitarist Brett Campbell knows its significance despite confessing to being a “train wreck” at the time: “For a lot of people Sorrow and Extinction is the Pallbearer album. It's like we peaked there. I obviously don't agree, but I understand that some people feel that way.”

 

That summer, Baroness were touring the UK, poised to release Yellow & Green, which singer and guitarist John Dyer Baizley describes as their “watershed”: “I felt we were putting out a record that was more definitively what I was interested in as a band than our prior two records.”

But the watershed was curtailed when Baroness experienced a catastrophic crash on the tour. Their bus plunged thirty feet from a viaduct on Brassknocker Hill, near the city of Bath. Guitarist Pete Adams got away with minor injuries but drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni both suffered fractured vertebrae. They later left the band, citing the “indelible marks” the accident had left them with, physically and mentally. 

As for Baizley, he broke his leg, and his left arm was severely broken in seven places. It took surgeons eight hours to rebuild it with two titanium plates, twenty screws and 1.5 feet of wire. Whilst recovering in hospital, he took a call from Metallica’s James Hetfield, who shared words of comfort and encouragement with him. Slowly, but surely, he began his long road to recovery and playing guitar again.

Speaking to Baizley now, twelve years later, on a Zoom with Campbell to discuss their upcoming UK and European tour together, his ardency shines through. This is a musician who had every reason to give up – but refused. Baizley has pushed himself and Baroness through the years, and several lineup changes, in an avid pursuit of honing his craft.

 

Last year’s Stone is a testament to the solidity of the band’s current situation. It's a focused, sinewy beast of an album; slimmed down and with a nastier bite than its predecessor, 2019’s Gold & Grey.

“If you're not constantly strengthening yourself, you're not constantly expressing yourself better,” says Baizley. “But it is also work as time goes on, to search for those breakthroughs. Whether they're vocal, whether they're in terms of composition or arrangement, or whether it's just something cooler than that. Like, I just want to write a cooler song or find a cooler sound. I don't want to be limited by volume. I don't want to be limited by technique. I don't want to be limited by even the fact that I play guitar. I want to be more and more fluid as a songwriter, more and more fluid as a person who expresses themselves.”

The two bands first crossed paths when Pallbearer supported Baroness in Philadelphia at their comeback show following the bus crash, on 24th May 2013. Sebastian Thomson and Nick Jost had joined Baroness on drums and bass, and have been in the band ever since.

Years later, they played together on one of Pete Adams’ last tours in 2016, including a ferociously hot show in Northampton, Massachusetts. So hot that hundreds of attendees complained to the township afterwards about the venue's lack of ventilation. Baizley checked in on Pallbearer after their set and found them laid out recovering and drummer Mark Lierly throwing up in a sink.

Campbell was astonished that Baroness persisted with a ninety-minute set. Baizley remembers the front row of the audience inquiring between songs whether the band was okay to continue. Reading between the lines, the fans were really asking them to call it an evening. But by that point, Baroness was made of sterner stuff.

“They're gonna fucking die,” Campbell remembers thinking. “Everyone's gonna die.”

Death was a preoccupation for Pallbearer at that point. Loss has haunted their work from the beginning. 2020’s Forgotten Days concerned the impact of the decade that had passed since the death of bassist Joseph Rowland’s mother. It also traced the mental disintegration Campbell saw taking place in his maternal grandmother, suffering from Alzheimer’s.

The album that followed this year, Mind Burns Alive, is a much more fragile thing. Ruminating on mental unease and the state of being unwell, songs like “Where the Light Fades” and “Signals” are stark and vulnerable. The music is stripped back. Campbell’s voice, previously often drenched in effects and soaring over turbid, overdriven guitars, sounds naked and alone. For him, it was a “natural transformation”.

 

“In the early stages of writing what was to become the record, these softer songs just emerged on their own,” he says. “There was no real impetus behind it. There was no conscious choice. There were some things in situations going on personally at the time that I think led to that approach.”

As a longtime fan of the band, Baizley was impressed.

“I think when you guys started, that was the interesting thing,” he says. “It was like, this is the loudest, heaviest, slowest, melody or harmony, really, that you're going to hear. And that's really impressive at first. But at some point, you go, ‘Well, but that's not it, right?’ It's interesting how wide the door felt like it was opened up the first time I listened to it.”

The heaviness of Mind Burns Alive is subtle. It’s emotionally heavy, of course, for a band that centers itself on what Campbell calls “grandiose portrayals of emotions”. But by the time the listener reaches “With Disease”, a closer that ruminates on the wider ills of society “drawn into delusion”, it’s like being a frog slowly boiled in water. The crushing sound of Pallbearer has returned, and we’re struggling to cope with the weight bearing down on us.

 

“The ultimate slow burn, man,” smiles Campbell. “Seeing people online being like, ‘They went soft, I couldn't make it past the third song.’ Well, you missed all the heavy shit!”

When Baroness made its first two EPs, and eventually 2007’s Red Album, they wanted to say something about where they had come from. They were four young men from Savannah, Georgia, who were huge punk and hardcore fans but also massively into classic rock. They grew up in the nineties, where bands like Sonic Youth, The Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana evinced that, in Baizley’s words, there was a “premium placed on how unique or original your sound was”.

Baroness has always been a singularly harmonious blend of the ornate and the elemental. Baizley’s voice is key to understanding their evolution. Gruff and harsh to begin with, it’s how he worked to expand its melodic potential that led to the breakthroughs on 2009’s Blue Record.

 

 

“Within almost any given track, Baroness twist between feelings of triumph and trouble, elation and depletion, playing all with unequal parts grace and grit,” Pitchfork wrote in its review of the album, catapulting Baroness into the sphere of heavy bands it was cool for hipsters to like.

Baizley kept pushing, confronting “the intimacy of the more naked human voice.” He describes how the singing voice is the unmediated expression of what’s in your heart. Whereas playing guitar requires you to use a pick, strum a string, send a signal down a wire, through an amplifier, and a sound wave out of a speaker 

“It has always been my intention to find places where I feel uncomfortable, places that I feel exposed,” he says.

When Adams left Baroness after the Roadburn Festival in 2017, Baizley lost a brother in arms, but gained a counterpart in Gina Gleason. A dextrous and fiery guitarist in her own right, Gleason also blends seamlessly with Baizley in their vocal harmonies. Pallbearer likewise thrives off the songwriting partnership between Campbell and Rowland.

Pallbearer’s lineup has remained stable since Sorrow and Extinction’s release. Campbell is content to be “part of the choir” and sees his role being to “capture what I feel, or what I understand to be, the essence of [a particular] piece of music.”

Whereas Campbell has a laconic sense of humor, delivered in his rich Arkansas accent, Baizley has an enthused and insistent (almost angstlike) energy about him as we speak. It’s not surprising. He’s had to fight to keep Baroness on the road. The sole remaining original member, and de facto leader, he's faced greater odds than most. His passion for what he does burns not out of desperation, but an ingrained drive for self-betterment.

“Before we really started the band, my artistic ideals and philosophy required that I [behaved in a certain way] as an individual artist, and then I learned how to transpose this into a band,” he says. “But it's my duty to push myself, and I feel like it's an obligation for me at this point, or part of the mission statement that I've got as an artist, to constantly be reaching beyond what I think my limits are, what my boundaries are. So that if, or when, I achieve that goal, I'm able to constantly kick the ball down the field.”

The upshot of this is that each Baroness album sees the band, in his words, “10% or 15% beyond where we have the right to be, technically or creatively or idealistically.”

 

He contrasts this mentality with that of someone who wants to be a successful musician. If success is the goal, find something you’re good at and refine it until it’s “the sharpest blade on the planet”. In other words, when bands hit on a successful formula, if that formula is all they care about, they can repeat it ad infinitum. Call it the AC/DC model. He respects it, but it doesn't interest him as an artist.

Both Baroness and Pallbearer have a keen sense of their back catalog and what they captured in the first flower of their youth. Neither band has shied away from marking anniversaries of certain albums, or even touring them in full, as Pallbearer did for the tenth anniversary of Sorrow and Extinction two years ago. 

“Maybe that version of me that wrote those songs will have something to teach the current version of myself when I relearn the stuff,” says Campbell. “So it's kind of cool, like a message from a former iteration of oneself.”

He’s more hesitant about doing the same with 2017’s Heartless, which he laughs would be a “fucking bitch to do, because all those songs are really difficult, especially to sing.”

When not exploring the ghosts they used to be, Campbell prefers Pallbearer to face forward. 

“We've always just considered ourselves like a really heavy progressive rock band,” he adds. “And if we weren't going to progress, then what is the point? To fall into the trap of trying to meet people's expectations, you'll never recapture that magic again.”

“I try not to ever describe us as progressive,” Baizley chips in.

“You don’t want to get a ponytail, goatee crowd?” quips Campbell.

“The thing is, how come they call Floyd and Rush ‘progressive’, but not Zeppelin?” continues Baizley (in the closest we come to a rant). “What's the distinction there? Because Zeppelin's catalog is every bit as dynamic. I think it's a bit of the ‘cool’ factor. I just don't think it's cool to actively engage in the idea of progression. I think it's a little bit flawed, partially due to its connotations, partially due to the idea that we have [that] progressive music is slightly dorky or nerdy and overindulgent in technique rather than intention.”

In Baizley’s eyes, if Baroness wasn’t inherently progressive, what would it be? A regressive band? A static band? Is it necessary to refer to a sports team as a “competitive” sports team?

Campbell and Baizley are both driven by conveying emotional truths. To express themselves as fully as they can, they need to evolve, and with that comes self-criticism. In honing their craft and getting better at what they do, there reaches a certain point where, in Baizley’s words, “technique can become your greatest enemy.”

“I think the ‘progressive’ musician takes every tool that they've got and uses it all the time,” Baizley continues. “And that's where you get into this Dream Theater sort of territory, where it's like, well, we can play in this insane time signature, so we might as well.”

Baizley uses the phrase “physician, know thyself”. It's shorthand for when to hold back and learn what not to do.

“Very technically focused music often becomes emotionally flat,” says Campbell, picking up the baton. “You can be the greatest technician in the world, but that doesn't mean you can write an interesting song. I watched Steve Vai. I got a free ticket. He played here a few months ago. I'm just like, this is the most boring fucking thing I've ever seen in my life. There's no emotion whatsoever. Yeah, you can fucking shred. But there's no story being told. I got nothing from him.”

Against exhibitionism, there is instinct. That purity of expression that encourages a heightened sense of intimacy between band and audience. Baizley speaks about the limited simplicity of the early Black Flag demos. Campbell points to the primal magic of the first Black Sabbath album. 

“When you're young, all you have is your instinct,” says Campbell. “You don't have wisdom, you don't have experience. But if you believe in yourself, and you think that you have something good – something worth sharing – and you have a vision, that's what makes the early records for most bands so interesting. It’s nothing but just pure confidence in this sound.”

For Campbell, the key is not to let the wisdom a band accrues impede it: “Being able to still listen to those instincts and not let the rules that you learn over time get in the way – that's essential to staying vital.”

 

 

With over twenty years under his belt in the music business, Baizley has experienced enough success to know what it feels like to have artistic ardor doused by cold reality. Also a hugely accomplished visual artist and cover designer, he speaks enthusiastically about the artistic instinct in every five-year-old to draw a picture when a box of crayons is put in front of them. Those who persist in pursuing artistic careers have had their pictures laughed at as they’ve gotten older, but carried on anyway.

“It's a weird thing because you experience a little bit of success, and then the coin flips,” says Baizley. “Not only do you have to learn how to be true to yourself and continue to follow your same instincts while applying new techniques and new learned behaviors and everything like that, but you also have to come into a practical and realistic understanding that if you want to continue doing this, then you have to do it in a way that somehow threads the needle of personal independence and personal self-expression, but also to do that in such a way that you can continue to do it in order to earn a living.”

 

 

“Sometimes purity of vision, purity of intent, bumps into living in the real world, and it's those points where I think we have to hold ourselves to a really high standard,” he continues. “Because there is a way to make your independent, creative ideal intersect with what people want, and that's by writing good music! Whether it's dissonant and angular and progressive and over the top, or simple and gutsy and folksy and straight to the heart, it is possible to exist in the world as an artist.”

When Baroness and Pallbearer come to town this Fall, it’s another stop in a long, winding road of expressing their art. Whether it’s huge and overbearing, or small and delicate, the music of these two Southern-rooted bands has something important to tell us about the triumph and loss of being human. Life, death and everything in between. All in the name of progression – of a sort.

Catch Baroness along with Pallbearer live on their upcoming European tour. The trek begins on the 29th of October in Gothenburg, SE and closes out in Nottingham, UK on November 28th. See the complete list of dates below.