By BRIAN GIFFIN
PALLBEARER’s 2020 album Forgotten Days saw the band eschewing their more progressive tendencies for simpler and direct bulldozing, crushing the listener under the weight of immense riffs and distortion. It was more a straight ahead doomfest as Heartless had leaned to the prog side of their muse.
Mind Burns Alive dials back the oppressive waves of fuzzy doom in favour of a wider dynamic range, subtleties and a sense of starker emotional grandeur more in keeping with their earlier work. The album opens onto “Where the Light Fades”, building from clean, frail and expressive guitars reminiscent of the musical interludes from Baroness’ Yellow and Green, already adding more sonic colour than they showed across the entirety of Forgotten Days. There are fresh layers and textures, also, and a tendency to highlight the fragility of Brett Campbell’s vocals as in the Opeth-like beginning of “Signals”, where – again – clean but melancholy guitar motifs carry more emotional weight than the cascading distorted riffs than come in later.
Centrepiece “Endless Place” is Pallbearer at both their most progressive and doomiest, a sprawling and evocative 10-minute journey of mood and melancholy crowned by a saxophone solo that swirls into a crescendo of distortion. Sax and brass instruments are making more and more appearances on metal recordings now, but like the King Crimson and Yes geeks Pallbearer are, they actually make it work here. “With Disease” is the album’s high point, where Pallbearer’s heaviest moments in many years rain down in an exhilarating close filled with soaring harmonised solos, savage riffs and anguished vocals. It is a fitting end to an album that deals with loneliness and isolation as part of the human experience. And while the general songwriting tends to rely on the slow-build-and-release format a little too much, Mind Burns Alive is a solid addition to the Pallbearer catalogue.
