“Hiding leagues of rot beneath.”
Following the mammoth success of 2020’s Forgotten Days, Arkansas doom metal quartet Pallbearer return with Mind Burns Alive, which sees the band stray from their previous effort’s all-out doom leanings in favour of a more gothic direction. Sonically, the album falls somewhere between Type O Negative and Anathema’s Judgement. Though I would not go so far as to call the album the October Rust of our time (despite its soaring, rich layers and luscious, vast soundscapes), Mind Burns Alive is gothic metal done correctly. Pallbearer manage to retain their accrued doom fanbase by blending in the roaring, down-tuned guitars of their prior work, bar the Sabbath-worship so abundant on Forgotten Days. The music retains Pallbearer’s identity, still as mournful as ever before. Good examples of this can be heard on “Endless Place” and “With Disease”, the latter containing my personal highlight of the album towards the end of the track, where the band exhibit some of their doom credentials with a raw aggression not heard for much of this release. Unfortunately, the album does feel a little one-note, as the songs are all roughly the same.
There is no denying that when you first put the album on, the lush warmth hits you immediately, with a warmth that can only be attributed to tape, whether it’s emulated or real. “Where the Light Fades” makes for a fantastic opening track and a clear choice for lead single, harking sonically in the direction of Pink Floyd’s vast, Dalí-bent expanses, and playing home to the autumnal depression of The Drab Four themselves, Type O Negative. Both bands have clearly had an influence upon Pallbearer, given the band’s covers of both groups in the past.
The album continues Forgotten Days’ auditory hugeness in a different font, if you will – instead of the stacks of raucous, sneering Orange amplifiers, Pallbearer employ warm, enveloping, and vast production to reach a common goal of sheer size. Mind Burns Alive is again like October Rust in a way related to this – the aforementioned layering and tasteful use of reverb, as well as the use of synthesisers, allowing the compositions to have a real atmosphere and depth to them. “With Disease” is a good example, featuring a guitar solo section around 4:45 which soars atop dense layers of pumping, stringent guitars, playing a super punchy riff that is 100% melancholic doom greatness. It’s all tastefully accompanied by synth strings that complete the beautiful drama the track is conveying. This section is also a great example of good use of delays, just to make the mix sound a little larger without drenching absolutely everything in reverb. Evidently, a competent mixing engineer was employed (or at the very least, the band themselves have a clue behind a mixing desk), which further still demonstrates my utter confusion as to how exactly the mono-compatibility issue ever came to be in the case of Mind Burns Alive.
The softer parts of “Signals” are delicate, with every stroke of the brushes upon the snare drum intimately clear and crisp. This is in contrast with the later all-out distorted affair in the same track, which feels almost structurally comparable to a Type O Negative track, but simultaneously like the band are performing a heavy cover of an Enya track – imagine “Only Time” but with layer-upon-layer of fuzzy down-tuned guitars. I suppose much of this can be attributed to vocalist Brett Campbell, whose vocal tonality is rather unique and could easily not be suited to this style of metal where a lower the voice is more preferable; however, he performs just as needed across the entire release, pulling off soaring vocal parts as well as the softer elements of the album in an impressively dynamic fashion.
Lyrically, Campbell outlines fittingly depressive depictions of life that do not come across in a disingenuous way – all lyrics appear to come from a particularly real place that those who have found themselves in such a place will relate to. “Endless Place” appears to muse on the topic of depression from a perspective within a person who feels they are so hopelessly depressed, with the metaphor of being trapped within the confines of an endless maze used. Campbell sings“Here I am / Alone and so confused / Imprisoned / Where walls whisper solitude” and goes on, “Unwinding corridors / No notion where they lead / any beauty on the surface / Hiding leagues of rot beneath”. This latter lyric seemingly makes note of the way people who feel depressed often put on a face in social situations, but it is a mask that is only skin-deep. This lyric could also be in reference to how people with depression often may feel anything positive in their lives is destined to eventually fall away, or that they feel they may no be entitled to such positive things.
Another lyric from “Endless Place” that struck me on an emotional level was “If you could hear me / Would you sense how far I’ve gone astray? / A little every day”. This shows how the depressed person feels they are slowly ‘rotting’ from within; who they are is being lost to their depression. They know this, and it kills them. “I would pay dearly / To find a pathway to escape / And leave this endless place” – they are desperate to feel okay again, but they feel it is so out of reach. These lyrics are beautiful and poetic, fitting of the genre Pallbearer are playing into with Mind Burns Alive. Speaking with Kerrang!, Campbell described the content of the album’s lyrical material overall as “themes of mental unease and people being unwell”.
The mixing, which in stereo is absolutely beautiful and plenty wide, seems amiss when it comes to the rhythm guitar tracks. They appear to be amateurishly copied and pasted and then panned left and right – the result is that mono compatibility strikes and they cancel out. This may not sound like much of a big deal, and whilst it is not an entirely deplorable thing, in a world of smartphones and mono speakers, I would expect better from Pallbearer.
Pallbearer make strides in a new gothic direction, pulling directly from the handbook of Type O Negative as a sort of mantra with regards to much of the album’s sonic qualities, with lyrics poetically depicting a real, deep subject matter on the darker corners of the human condition. Whilst the album is the softest and arguably their most experimental to date, Pallbearer cease to be boring, like a lot of long-form doom metal can be. The band make sure the songs are as long as they need to be, rather than how long they could be. With music that lands solidly in the category of experimental, featuring unorthodox additions such as the one-off introduction of a saxophone, the band do not stray too far out of the doom metal genre, with the welcome addition of some gothic elements introducing a new flavour to Pallbearer’s catalogue. With mostly fantastic production, Mind Burns Alive comes as close as many bands could ever hope to the renowned sound of October Rust as most have managed to since 1996.
7/10
Mind Burns Alive releases on the 17th May and can be pre-ordered here.