Review: Pallbearer Industry ‘Antarctica Rising’
Somewhere in the darkness on the edge of the deepest, unearthly and contorted underground of the Ottawa Valley, Ontario, Canada, three extreme noise terrorists and tough space paladins that go under the funereal name of Pallbearer Industry have sowed fear into the surrounding area and beyond in each and every waking hour from the very first day they were born.
Jeff Dowdall (drums, percussions, synths), Pat Farrell (guitars, vocals, effects) and Leigh Newton (bass, vocals, keyboards) have known each other since their school days, and their intent to produce fearless, cathartic, destructive, dark, industrial experimental noise has always been part of their everyday thoughts. They define themselves as doom space travellers who carry along very infectious and venomous instruments of deadly dust spreading around unhealthy astral pollution.
The name Pallbearer Industry, as Newton explained to me, is something that Dowdall came up with and is ‘something about a group of individuals in their best suits silently and solemnly providing a much-needed end-of-life service.’ The Pallbearer Industry sound is grown inside a sphere of industrial sulphate smoke, and although they aren’t here to provide the silent and solemn service they speak of, they can still help you on your way to an atmospheric and less diminished ending with ethereal space sounds.
Since 2021 up until now, they have released ten records which include two live recordings, EPs and three full length albums all released via different labels such as UK labels Misophonia and Up In Her Room, Atalanta Georgia’s Echodelick, and Canadian label We, Here & Now. The sound produced by these three hard-skinned guys on each of their works isn’t uniform, but expands through every aspect of dark noise and experimental musical abstractionism, touching with dub space sonority where from time to time they spit out bursts of brutal grizzly screams and tormenting vocals that make your skin crawl.
frighteningly cathartic doom noise that intoxicates the brain…
Their latest work is their third studio album to date. Titled Antarctica Rising, it’s an alarming vision of the devastating climatic situation that our planet is about to face in the foreseen future. And all this reflects on the music produced as they sink into an otherworldly sound that seems to come out from the underground meanders of a world that wants to explode with all its fears and dark forebodings.
On the seven tracks contained within this new work, they want to show us how insane they went into using and abusing their instruments causing a Massive Tempest from which you can’t easily recover. Although each and every track streams with visceral and frightening indifference, the title track prevails from the rest of the album. It overflows with a frighteningly cathartic doom noise that intoxicates the brain of every listener with a deluge of excruciatingly destructive sounds that is very close to those produced by Michael Gira’s Swans, the late The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart first solo works, or even the slaying magnetic resonances unleashed by Cabaret Voltaire.
Antarctica Rising is an album born from the bowels of Dante’s Inferno, but from which of the nine circles we do not know, as this will remain a secret forever kept by three well suited men who form Pallbearer Industry.
Label: Up In Her Room | Echodelick Records | We, Here And Now
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
