There’s a lot of clichéd imagery associated with doom metal, involving alternate universes where wizards build pyramids on other planets and what have you. This sort of otherworldliness plays an important yet subtle part in the lauded film clip for Pallbearer’s Watcher In The Dark. Released a couple of months ago, the video is shot in the wilds of both the forest and the desert, and in the first phase, as the song builds from an ethereal intro into a crushing main riff, the sonic shift is heralded by the form of a pyramid naturally positioned in a lake.
“A lot of it was up to the director, but initially he gave us the treatment of what he wanted to do,” Rowland says. “We had some discussion, primarily between Brett and the director, to take it in a different direction to what was initially intended and make it considerably more psychedelic. That’s how it ended up with those kaleidoscopic effects. We’re really, really excited with how psychedelic it ended up. It suits the song quite well.”
Musically, Watcher In The Dark features guitars tuned to drop A. This tuning is used across the entire Foundations Of Burden album. Despite being somewhat unconventional, the band’s choice of tuning transpired without much thought. “I think drop A ended up being sort of the natural progression for us,” Rowland says. “Because the band that Brett and I were in prior to Pallbearer – which was a totally improvised heavy psychedelic band – we used drop A in that band. In our previous band it was totally arbitrary [to be in that tuning], so I don’t even remember why we decided on having drop A tuning.”
Staying with technical talk, Rowland tells us about the various bass guitars he uses. “Over the last few years my main things that I have been playing is a Fender Precision bass,” he says. “[However] last year, for most of that year, I have used a Guild B 301 bass from the ’70s that I like a lot. But I ended up switching to playing a Paul Reed Smith Kingfisher bass on this most recent tour, because I wanted to give the Guild bass a bit of a break – it’s old and I probably don’t need to be so hard with it as much as I have been.”
Rowland’s inventory of bass guitars pales in comparison to the stock of guitars that Campbell and Holt have at their disposal during any given Pallbearer show. “Devin’s got a Baritone Flying V that he just got recently,” says Rowland, “plus a Les Paul as a back-up and Brett has a Paul Reed Smith Vela and a Gibson SG. Plus they both have Stratocasters and a number of other guitars that they just swap in and out of depending on what they feel like playing.”
Perhaps Pallbearer’s greedy gear habits explain why their show at Ding Dong Lounge on June 17 is the first time they’ve ever played in Melbourne. Either way, head along to witness the four horsemen of the sonic apocalypse in action.
BY DAN WATT
