PALLBEARER: The Burden of Existence (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

FOUR years ago, Arkansas doom maestros Pallbearer released Forgotten Days, a sprawling bonanza of epic riffs, distortion and surging heaviness. The band’s latest album, Mind Burns Alive, is a very different beast, where subtleties and ambience preside over the monstrous sludge and huge rolling grooves.

What could have changed in the band for them to have created something so starkly different this time?

“Pretty much nothing,” says vocalist and guitarist Brett Campbell. “Practically all the songs were written at the same time as the last album. We had an extremely fruitful writing period where we just wrote an insane amount of material and it became pretty obvious early on that we had some steamroller songs – and some more subtle songs – and they probably shouldn’t be on the same album.”

So they decided to split things up. 

“Perhaps we could make two much stronger albums by focusing on the differences in the batch of songs,” Campbell explains. “Let’s take the subtle songs – the more exploratory songS – and make those an album, and all these riff monsters another album.”

While the subtleties – the word “subtle” comes up a lot in this conversation – might throw a curveball to those who came to the band through Forgotten Days, Campbell argues that the stylistic choices are fundamentally the same.

“It’s just the riffs don’t have distortion. What might be an extended air or silence on this record, put a buzz on it and it’s now a droning chord. It’s really the heart of the band, the essence of what we are as an artistic statement, it’s still there. It’s just a different presentation.”

Mind Burns Alive certainly pulls back on the heaviness that Pallbearer espoused on the previous album. Forgotten Days took their progressive doom to a crushing new level. It was an experiment that Campbell remains ambiguous about. On one hand he acknowledges that it was necessary to this album’s development that Forgotten Days was so heavy, but feels that there may have been room to claw that back too.

“I have mixed feelings about it. All our albums are an experiment. On that one I feel like we should have pulled back, but I’m glad that we went all in on that album because we got to see what that was like, having a practically all-heavy album, and it really rubberbanded us and made Mind Burns Alive pulled back even more than we perhaps would have done if we were just trying to combine all the songs into one album.”

Had they done that, he reasons, some tracks may have been either overlong or discarded. It would have probably resulted in a “more thematically scattered” album, Campbell suggests. Creating separate albums allowed them to focus on the strengths of each set of songs. But it meant holding onto a lot of material for more than four years. It gave Pallbearer a lot of time to re-work and re-evaluate them, and yet in the end not a great deal changed about them.

“Some of the songs evolved, but what happened in several cases is that we were re-arrange songs and then they would go back to the way they were,” Campbell explains. That element of subtlety comes up again: “I think the changes that stuck were more subtle, like how the drums approach a particular section. Like the way this album focuses on subtle, the most important changes were subtle. They made a world of difference. Instead of adding a section or excising a section or changing something in a big, sweeping, dramatic way, the most impactful changes were subtle, small changes that add up to a lot. Which I think is kind of appropriate based on the subject.”

Regarding the subject matter, Mind Burns Alive follows Pallbearer’s continuing exploration of the human condition and the burden of existence. This time, the themes are related to how those struggles are dealt with, and the way that, sometimes, they can often make things even worse.

“Whether those struggles are external or internal, sometimes one leads to another,” Campbell says. “Often, perhaps. You get caught up in drugs or alcoholism, coping mechanisms for dealing with trauma or existence. Shit happens to people and the things they look to to make things feel better just make things worse, in the long term.”

In a sense, it is songs that are, in Campbell’s own words, “about people who are fucked up in the head”.  Totally in character with the band themselves, then.

“Speaking for myself, I think I’m fucked up too,” he jokes, “but I make the most of it. That’s why I’m in this band!”

Despite the grim and at time bleak nature of Pallbearer’s exploration of mortality and struggle, it is never completely without hope. Casting such large shadows also brings light into sharper focus. It is more a reflection on the experience of living than of despair itself.

“This music is kind of meant to be … I don’t want to say healing, because that puts a lot of responsibility on it, but it’s intended to be a reflection of what it’s like to be alive! It’s reflecting the human experience. It’s not meant to be cartoonish. I try very hard to capture emotions in a real way that pertains to a lived experience.”

Fate doesn’t really play much of a part in Campnbell’s philosophy. Life’s path is no predestination and wallowing in misery leads nowhere. Hard times happen to everyone, and people are capable of lifting themselves out of them, no matter how tough it may be. Pallbearer’s music is designed to reflect only part of the human condition.

“I don’t believe that people have no control over their lives,” he says. “If things were predetermined, and your life sucks, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just gonna suck forever. I don’t believe that’s true! I think that some things are harder for some than they are for others, and everyone struggles at some point, to some degree and some have a real bad time of it. But it’s always worth pursuing something better. Even if it takes a long time and you don’t perceive a way out, you don’t see things getting better, I think there can be. I can’t promise, but I think that it’s possible. If you give up, and you think you can’t control your life then things won’t be better, because you haven’t given it a chance. I do think that despite our music focusing on the darker side of that experience, it’s not meant to be permanent. This is something you experience, but it isn’t all of experience.”