Forgotten Days was indeed a forgettable album. It saw Pallbearer continue on from the progressive influence on Heartless into something more direct, yet with less character. The band that made its name with very emotional, long-form doom metal felt tired, and I chalked it up to the pandemic interfering, like it did with so many things. This argument is less persuasive to me after having heard Mind Burns Alive, the band’s fifth full length effort. The progressive side of the band is back, yet colored differently by a larger rock-to-metal ratio than before, in favor of the former. This is not the upbeat or punky rock you might expect from post punk or noise rock bands, but rather the arena rock-ballad kind, somewhere between Neil Young and Takida (think of Takida like a Swedish, sadboi Alter Bridge). Mind Burns Alive could easily aim for radio play if the songs were not seven plus minutes like they are here. Pallbearer used to win me with the fragile emotion on display on Sorrow and Extinction and Foundations of Burden, along with a crunchy doom sound akin to a elongated Black Sabbath style — which you can also find in Yob. If this is what you are looking for on Mind Burns Alive then you will be sorely disappointed.
I always try to follow in the same direction as bands when they take big turns into something new, but two gaping flaws prevent me from extracting any enjoyment from Mind Burns Alive. The first of which has to do with the vocals. Brett Campbell always fit the Pallbearer sound like a glove, sounding brittle and emotional against the doom metal yet also commanding in intense moments. On Mind Burns Alive he tries to push into slightly deeper r&b-adjacent vocals like the ones Joel Ekelöf (Soen) uses. You can hear this clearly on “Where the Light Fails” and “Signals”. The problem is that Campbell‘s vocals are much more nasal, and this technique falls flat immediately. In color theory, a color can look very different depending on what colors surround it. The same principle can be applied to Pallbearer‘s vocals: without being supported by the heavy crunch of the guitar distortion, Campbell‘s voice goes from fragile to unfortunately whiny. This is such a miss for a band where the vocals have always carried a lot of weight, not only missing while experimenting with something new, but also while trying to preserve what was.
The other flaw is simply that the writing is poor. Much of the album focuses on the flat vocals and remains quiet for most of the time, with some intermittent bursts of rock and doom metal. Some of the builds to climaxes show shades of the once morose and haunting Pallbearer, like in “Endless Place,” which also features a saxophone breakdown, and closer “With Disease”. Yet these songs are both ten minute beasts that are far less interesting in their first half than what comes later. The title track has a sunny-day-on-the-beach relaxed feeling to it, used for contrast, yet it feels off-putting in context to the other songs. Pallbearer are competent, like always, but what is here is too often in service to the vocals and at its worst, the album feels as thin as air. As the content on Mind Burns Alive trends towards its softer moments, so does the production. Everything sounds cleaner and while still occasionally impacting, the guitars mostly stay flat in the background. Pallbearer feel like a very different band now from when they started out. The direction they have taken on this release is baffling to me. Less bland than Forgotten Days, the highs are higher but the lows are also much lower. I hope they find their stride again on the next release.
