It was set to be an amazing night. I mean how can things go wrong when both Pallbearer and Ancient VVisdom were on the bill? Sadly, the eternal truth is that things can always get worse. Well, in this instance, things can get partially worse.
It was your typical night in Burlington, Vermont - that small city that I have claimed as my home ever since the University of Vermont made the foolhardy decision of letting me teach an introductory English class. When Pallbearer came to town, I was no longer teaching English and I was no longer attending school. Did this mean I had more free time? Hardly, but occasionally I could carve out some “Me Time” here and there. Metal Mondays, a weekly gathering of beer and debauchery in the heart of Grateful Dead country, usually falls under the rubric of allowable slacker time. After all, Metal Mondays are the few times when I can hang out with my fellow metalheads over pints and our shared interests in all things loud and stupid.
On this particular night, I spent a very metal and merry time with two dudes I had never seen at the festivities before. One of them was a former grad school compatriot, while the other was his cerebral friend. Of the two, one was clearly a diehard doom fan. Let’s call this guy Josh. Well, Josh was wearing a Maryland Deathfest t-shirt that night, and for the most part, his interests could be pared down to two key utterances: 1) “The best band at MDF was Melvins,” and; 2) “I was so bummed when I couldn't see Sleep.” It was clear to me after two seconds that Josh was the type of guy that I could get along with.
The other dude in this triangular equation (let’s call him Stan) at first seemed out-of-sorts. Stan is a well-known and open admirer of European power metal - a genre that I consider too cheesy to mention in polite company. If this isn’t bad enough, Stan, who is not a gregarious man by any means, often turned our shared classes into digressions about his interests in conceptual prog rock and his overwhelming knowledge of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional universe. I mean the guy by his own admission can speak “a little Elvish.”
Needless to say, our combined nerd factor that night would have broken any Geiger counter. And, as is so typical in the heavy metal community, our radioactive love for the riff meant that we belonged to a boys only club by default. Ask my girlfriend - she’ll tell you that I am at my least attractive when I am pontificating on the finer points of Norwegian black metal or the animalistic imagery that is produced by the first five minutes of “Crowbar” by Crowbar.
Well, luckily for her, that night she stayed home. I don’t think she would have liked to have seen me playing the air guitar with Josh and Stan, nor would she have gotten a kick out my hour-long heandbanging session courtesy of Pallbearer. Worst of all, she would have been personally hurt by my childish reaction to the news that Ancient VVisdom was not going to be gracing the stage that night. Somewhere along the vast highway system of the Northeast, Ancient VVisdom ran into some van trouble. Rather than empathize with the four chaps from Texas, I pouted and snarled “sonofabitch” out loud when I heard the news.
While I was healing my wide open wounds (Stan and Josh weren’t fans, so they did not care too much), two local acts took to the stage. The first was a bass and drum duo who presented a musical mix-up of jam, space rock, and funk metal. They weren’t all that bad, but their fans ruffled my silly elitist feathers with their dancing and chipper smiles. “This isn’t a Phish concert,” I thought, “so stop with all the flower power gyrations.”
To be fair, only two out of the three dancers were obnoxious. The two were a cute couple, so naturally they can’t help but to instill in people the urge to brain them with blunt axes. The third person - a motherly type - seemed pretty awesome. Josh and I both appreciated the fact that she was supplying the younger couple with plenty of brews. Better yet, this party mom really seemed to dig it when the weirdo duo on stage made things a little heavy. My mom worshipped James Taylor and Van Morrison, so this beer-swilling matriarch seemed like Miles Davis in comparison to my old mum (who was a swinger in her own day).
After these three and the band that they so enjoyed left the stage, they were replaced by Abaddon - a local blackened death metal band with some serious skills. Abaddon sound fairly polished to my ears, even though their professional catalog is almost non-existent. Abaddon’s lead singer, who used to work in a grocery with my best bud in Burlington, has some the meatiest and harshest growls that I have ever heard, on record or not. The icing on the cake is that Abaddon are fans of “Trailer Park Boys” and even have a song called “Shithawks.” That night, while Abaddon were going through their set, the lead singer noticed that a hipster girl in the crowd was sporting a back patch that contained the glorious triumvirate of Bubbles, Ricky, and Julian. Thinking that he had made a like-minded friend, the singer would begin every song with a line or two quoted from the hit Canadian TV show. He was obviously trying to get the girl to play along, but surprisingly, she seemed dumbfounded by what he was saying. Tragically, Abaddon had found a poseur caught out of their element.
In between this banter, Abaddon played a full set of mean, crunchy, and lightning fast tracks. Even though I had seen them plenty of times before, I still banged my head and threw up the horns in appreciation for their sheer badassness. Josh and Stan seemed mildly into it. Without saying anything, their tepid response to Abaddon told me that this type of metal just didn’t appeal to them. Luckily, Stan and Josh aren’t the type to outright hate something they don’t like, so the irksome argument of metal sub-genre versus metal sub-genre didn’t happen that night.
When the pulverizing drums of Abaddon stopped, Pallbearer took the stage. The first one on was bassist Joseph D. Rowland. I had bought a Pallbearer t-shirt off of him earlier in the night, so I kidded myself that he and I had some sort of connection. Since I am the type who is mortified by the prospect of actually meeting the bands he likes, I would never act on this mythical connection. Sam, another pal of mine who showed up late, isn’t so shy, and while Rowland was tuning up, Sam approached him with three cheers for aluminum basses. Rowland didn’t really respond and just kept on tweaking his tone.
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After Rowland, the rest of the band started gearing up for a very loud gig. Lead singer and guitarist Brett Campbell had been watching Abaddon earlier, so by the time he was plugging in his Fender Modern Player Telecaster, some of the crowd were trying to chat him up like an old chum. Again, like Rowland, Campbell kept his focus on configuring that massive tone that his band requires for their live shows and recordings.
By the time that Pallbearer’s opening song kicked in, I knew that I was in for something special. I had been to plenty of Metal Mondays before, but this one was the loudest. Hell, it even put Napalm Death to shame in terms of sheer volume. That night it felt like the Earth was shifting, and since Pallbearer probably played every song off of “Sorrow and Extinction” that night, the Earth might have actually collapsed for all we knew. Josh and I didn’t care; we were too busy being those dorks who keep their heads down and their horned fingers up. We knew that we were going to hurt in the morning, and we knew that we weren’t going to be the most enthusiastic people at the office the next day. None of that mattered though; Pallbearer was playing in front of us, so the world was going along just fine.
Amazingly, Josh and I seemed like the only two people who were getting it. Pallbearer played for well over an hour that night, but the crowd had thinned considerably after just ten minutes. While Pallbearer’s type of doom can be overbearing (especially considering the fact that Pallbearer let the feedback do its thing in between songs), the fact of the matter is that Pallbearer are one of the best young metal bands around today. All the critics think so, and even though rock critics are often guilty of some serious miscues, a majority of them can’t be wrong.
More than anything else, this reaction proved one thing: doom metal is the genre’s hardest drink to swallow. While the other forms of extreme metal have gained some acceptance in one form or another, doom metal remains heavy metal’s most overlooked child. Yes, doom metal is musically simplistic and does not “progress” metal in the way that that term implies. However, doom metal’s abandonment of speed and technicality in favor of slow and heavy riffs is exactly what makes it one of heavy metal’s last redoubts of true rebellion. Many metal fans may claim to be against trends, but often times when they are confronted with something that runs counter to their preconceived notions of what heavy metal is, they uniformly pan it like the conformist they claim to abhor. This is a sad fact, but it is a fact that has plagued all underground movements since the dawn of rebellion.
Such sermonizing of this sort came to me much later. While Pallbearer were playing, all I cared about was Pallbearer. They crushed me and they exhausted me. When that concert ended, I felt like had just survived an MMA match - my guts hurt, my neck was making funny noises, and my hands were throbbing like they had just been stung by an army of wasps. In short, I felt like a good metalhead who had just done his proper duty. I went out that night in order to support a great band, and fortunately, I got to share this with some good people. Sub-genre spats aside, the heavy metal community is still an amazing place, and on the night when Pallbearer came to town, the whole hippie city of Burlington seemed so grow much cooler.
Words:
Benjamin Welton
