My Left Ear Is Still Ringing
The last time I saw Pallbearer was 2017, in Brooklyn, on the Heartless tour. I got a poster signed at a record shop out there and I still have it. Foundations of Burden and Heartless aren’t just two of my favorite doom records, they’re probably in my top twenty albums period, the ones I keep going back to year after year. So when I found out they were playing Foundations of Burden front to back in a 350-capacity room in Santa Ana, that was an easy yes.
This was my first time in the Constellation Room, the side room at the Observatory, and it will not be my last. I’d be surprised if 250 people were in there. Small and intimate without feeling cramped. The sound was loud, to put it lightly. My left ear is still ringing as I write this, and I’m not necessarily complaining. The thing I noticed before a note was played: Pallbearer and Ordh were working their own merch booths at the back of the room, hanging out with the crowd between sets. You hardly ever see that anymore.
Chrome Ghost opened to maybe fifty people and played like it was five hundred. Sacramento band, traditional doom with some light death metal running underneath, and the Pallbearer and Sleep influence is right there on the surface. The singer has a genuinely great clean voice, and every so often he drops into a growl that lands hard precisely because he doesn’t lean on it. You want more of it when it comes, and it never overstays its welcome. The room was small enough that between songs, with the bass sitting in that heavy muffled register, I could hear the snare springs rattling. It felt like an elevated garage show played by a band that knows exactly what it’s doing. They’re eleven years and three albums into this and they didn’t have a single piece of merch at the show, which tells you plenty about how hard it is out here right now. Keep an eye on them.
Ordh were the pleasant shock of the night, and I’m a little ashamed I didn’t know them, because they’re squarely in my lane. Progressive death metal with black metal streaks, somewhere in the neighborhood of Rivers of Nihil, with the kind of deep growls you’d get from Two Hundred Stab Wounds or Frozen Soul. Guitarist Graham Brooks is a virtuoso, full stop, and his solos were the high point of the set. One oddity: their credited vocalist, Jonathan Hébert, wasn’t there, and Brooks handled vocals himself. Nobody mentioned it from the stage and I couldn’t find anything explaining it. Lineup change or a one off, I don’t know. It didn’t hurt the set.
Then Pallbearer, and the reason this tour exists. Last year the band went back to the original 2014 recordings and rebuilt Foundations of Burden as the 2025 Redux, remixed by Mario Quintero and remastered, out on Profound Lore. I usually hate this stuff. Bands go back and change the sound in ways that don’t make sense, and capturing what a band sounded like at that moment in time matters more than most of them admit. Pallbearer did it right. They kept the spirit of the record completely intact and gave it the money and the tools it should have had in 2014. It sounds better than ever. If you’re going to listen to Foundations of Burden, listen to that one.
Live, it was the perfect show for me. “Worlds Apart,” “The Ghost I Used to Be” and “Vanished” all brought the house down. Six songs, just over an hour, from a band that has perfected what it does, and a whole room doing the slow doom head bob in a space that small. They closed with Type O Negative’s “Love You to Death,” which is a perfect fit for them, and who doesn’t love that song. Then they walked into the crowd, hung out, took pictures and signed whatever people put in front of them.
I’ll be honest, their last couple of records landed as just okay for me. Going back and giving their best album the presentation it always deserved was a better answer than another new one would have been. If you have a chance to see this tour, go see it.
Score: 9/10
Setlist
- Worlds Apart
- Foundations
- Watcher in the Dark
- The Ghost I Used to Be
- Ashes
- Vanished
- Love You to Death (Type O Negative cover)
Foundations of Burden performed in full, in album order.