Live Review : Baroness + Graveyard + Pallbearer @ New Century Hall, Manchester on November 22nd 2024

The Great trilogies. Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games books, Toy Story, the original Star Wars saga (yes we know, Ewoks, but Return of the Jedi is infinitely better than anything that came after). To that impressive lexicon, you can now add this tour of a holy Trinity of modern metal masters. 

Pallbearer, Graveyard and Baroness are all doing something distinctly different in their individual musicality. They all reside in diverse corners of metal's grand and fertile landscape. What they do share and what makes this tour so appealing and also so cohesive, is a deep-seated seam of emotional intelligence. None of them trade in knuckle-dragging “beers and tits” brainless bravado. Instead, whilst the styles are varied and differential, they all sculpt music to make you think and in many cases music to make you cry. Put simply this is the wearing your heart on your sleeve tour.

With door opening times deceptively earlier than advertised, the wonderful Pallbearer take the stage to a woefully thin audience, unrepresentative of both their pedigree and their popularity. This is doom metal but an emotive and fragile variant that not just tugs at the heartstrings, but takes hold of all your hormones and heaves for all its life. The sound is slow, penetrative, and dripping in pathos. They weave a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of eloquent and ethereal noise. Nothing is ever rushed with this band, the delivery is glacially slow with the riffs stretched out to their maximum capacity. This is metal reimagined as heartbreaking torch songs, and it is just wonderfully evocative.

The newly released “Mind Burns Alive” finds Pallbearer taking an even more maudlin and monotone turn. It is quite frankly a spectacular exercise in restrained, minimal emotion. Every aeon of passion is wrung out over its 50-minute running time. Tonight provides the first opportunity to hear the fruits of it live. ‘Signals’ and ‘With Disease’ are astonishing. They roll out in a measured, leisurely fashion, gradually revealing their emotive riches. Pallbearer’s penchant for lengthy ditties means that, alongside the new stuff, we get just two sneaks back into their formidable back catalogue. They bid farewell with ‘World’s Apart’, a lethargic ode that manages to simultaneously be desolately bleak and also full of warmth and even hope. Heartbreak and loss has never sounded so wonderful.

By the time we get to Graveyard’s designated start time, the room is absolutely heaving. There is a palpable atmosphere of expectation. Whilst this is firmly a co-headline endeavour it is very obvious that there is a large chunk of the audience here specifically for the Swedish retro-meisters. In stark contrast to Pallbearer's sentimental and sluggish delivery, Graveyard come out of the traps at a ferocious velocity. It feels akin to watching The Stones when they were still the greatest rock n’ Roll band on earth. Joakim Nilsson has put down his guitar allowing him to fully embrace the role of dynamic frontman. He seems liberated freed from the shackles of his instrument and spends his time cavorting around the stage, living out all his Robert Plant fantasies. 

To ensure that they can still build their luscious intertwined led melodies, they have temporarily expanded to a five-piece bringing on a new member introduced tonight as being of at least partial British descent. They have also stopped piping through the organ as a backing track. Everything now heard, is created in front of us on the stage and it is magnificent in both its swagger and also its sheer quality. Graveyard have always unashamedly mined the past. They produce a richly authentic 70’s sound that is reverential and also fiercely respectful. This is blues driven rock as it was meant to be played and it is astonishing in its virtuosity and also energetic vigour. 

Whilst they are still ostensibly promoting new album “6” (unsurprisingly their sixth studio release) we actually get very little from it. Instead they choose to skitter around their past glories and specifically rely on material from “Hisingen Blues”, “Lights Out” and “Peace”. ‘Uncomfortably Numb’ from the former release is astounding in its warm, retro embrace. The guitar work is sincere and heartfelt and Joakim’s vocals soar. ‘Walk On’ from the latter of the three albums is equally extraordinary. It uses its middle arc to wander off into jamming territory, creating a free-form ecosystem of trapping drums and chugging guitars.

Its not clear whether they are overrunning or whether the set times have been grossly underestimated, but they are still happily building succulent sculptures of vibrant blues-rock as we reach the proposed start time for Baroness’ set. They seem undaunted by this and let closing number ‘The Siren’ run away with itself in spectacular splendour. Joakim has an incredible range and his vocals are stretched to the limit as he reaches to the stars in crescendoing wonder. It may feel like every other band currently is trying to sound like they've been plucked from the proto-rock sound of 70s, but there really is no band that do it as well and with as much genuality as Graveyard. Completely brilliant.

It is not clear whether a proportion of the audience has decided to take an early bath or whether all those present had decided to densely pack themselves upfront, nevertheless the back of the room dramatically empties as we await the arrival of Baroness. If people have decided to make a break for it, then more fool them, as Baroness are on absolute fire this evening. It feels like playing after a band of the pedigree and absolute quality of Graveyard has made them up their game another few notches. Baroness cavort on the stage in a cloud of hyper-energy and they just accelerate from there. John Baizley briefly suggests that because they have a rare day off tomorrow, this is also their Friday night. They certainly seem to be in hyperactive form, bouncing around the room like toddlers high on tartrazine. 

It's hard to imagine a time when Gina Gleason wasn't in the band, given her now telepathic relationship with John. Their instruments effortlessly banter and they cohesively trade licks like they are the same person but just split into two bodily vessels. When John is not perched atop his vanity step, they play back-on-back, willing the churning riffs out of their respective guitars. Whilst Graveyard were marvellous and received a hearty reception, it just feels like the energy in the room not only replenishes but multiplies.. Like Graveyard they also have a relatively new album to promote but they also know what their devoted fanbase wants. Therefore, the three new tracks are dispensed with early doors and with over two-thirds of the set to go it is just open water in terms of reeling out known and loved material.

They race through the set like they have a curfew to beat. The beauty of Baroness has always been that they condense complex music into short songs. Tonight they dispense with the rest of the set in a machine gun fashion. ‘Shock Me’ into ‘Swollen and Halo’ into ‘Tourniquet’ into ‘Isak’. Each track unveiled in a more incendiary fashion than the previous. Baroness beautifully balance the simplistic pleasure of raucous heavy music with emotional literacy and an unequivocal understanding of how to build songs that continually surprise. The songwriting prowess is just simply extraordinary and even within their short running length, ‘Tourniquet’ and ‘Isak’ twist and turn with a humongous velocity.

Just when you feel that the furore cannot build up any further, ‘Take My Bones Away’ manages to ascend us all to another level. Gina bounces around like a Fraggle on amphetamine, whilst John wrenches out riffs with an authoritarian sneer. The audience by this point is careering around in flagellatory ecstasy and they scream out the lyrics as if they were their collective last will and testament. The band sense that their work is not yet done and that the adulation careering toward them in a tsunami of good will is something rather special indeed. We get an unplanned and unscripted encore and ‘The Sweetest Curse’ is rolled out for one final hoe down. 

It is very easy to chuck around superlatives like confetti. It is very easy to call something the greatest knowing full well that the same moniker will be used with the same level of enthusiasm within another forthcoming review. But this evening was special. The evening saw three bands, three very different and musically diverse bands all on their A-game. All providing virtuoso performances and proving beyond doubt why they are all spoken with in reverential whispers about being the finest we have within the genre. An absolute unrepeatable masterclass in modern metal.

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!
Baroness + Graveyard + Pallbearer