PALLBEARER – Mind Burns Alive

vote
8.0

• Bands:
  PALLBEARER
• Duration: 00:50:56
• Available from: 05/17/2024
• Label:

• Nuclear Blast

Streaming not yet available

Twelve years have now passed since Pallbearer's debut, and many things have changed. Many things change in twelve years, and those who find themselves to be the same person as in 2012 most likely do not actually realize not to be.
In this sense, the music of the new album by the band from Little Rock, Arkansas, has something human, in its evolution, in its figures, different, yes, from the beginning, but evidently the result of the same pen.
Of course, taking “Sorrow And Extinction” and this “Mind Burns Alive” perhaps we find very few affinities between what Pallbearer were and what they are: but listening to the four previous albums again, a path, a path, seems to form, the wrinkles under the eyes begin to take on a meaning, certain softened nuances find their meaning, their position in the world.
It can leave you dumbfounded, of course: “Mind Burns Alive” is a record that makes the Pallbearer of 2024 appear to be a more staid band, less lively perhaps, than their youthful version. Slowness has always been there in the music of the four, but never as much as now is the cynical sadness drawn by the band cloaked in reflexivity, alive with dilations; the sounds become longer, the distortions leave more room for sighs than for moans shouted at the sky.
You suffer with a faint voice, but never without passion, in “Mind Burns Alive”, because when this comes out it does so with force, the riffs pop out, pierce the silence with heaviness, impetuosity, making the moments of quietness that characterizes the six long, drawn-out pieces, tending to twist within themselves. The sounds of this album are now deep and serious, now docile, barely mentioned, light, sensitive, sometimes nostalgic, seeking the most disparate inspirations: Black Sabbath, Type O Negative, Pink Floyd, Rush, Miles Davis, Asunder, Anathema, certain post rock ambitions à la Mogwai, all on a sound platform to be fully enjoyed with good headphones or nice speakers.
They have changed, the Pallbearers of 2024, yet you can recognize them in a few moments, so much so have they managed to standardize their progressive, melancholic and delicate doom, and even with this less impetuous version of themselves they manage to hit the mark. Whether it's trying your hand at songs more relevant to the roots (“Endless Pain”, with its rocky structure and its interlude with the sax), or seventies re-enactments that perhaps have little metal, like the poignant “Where The Light Fades” – which nevertheless strikes with intensity – or the airy “Daybreak”, but which nevertheless fails to convey a sense of pain with light touches.
Or again, the final “With Disease”, perhaps an ideal summary of all the latest events involving Pallbearer, is a complete piece capable of acting as a summation of the Americans' work, taking up the various forms and compressing them into a dozen minutes.
A record like this requires a considerable amount of attention to reveal all its little secrets, and perhaps even a certain predisposition to the genre, but it manages to involve the player right from the first turn. Pallbearer, once again, manage to bring out the quality of their proposal beyond the (sub)genre played, and although “Mind Burns Alive” risks leaving some bitter taste in the mouths of the orphans of the first version of the band (but those will have already abandoned the boat a couple of albums ago), has all the potential to surprise and reward those who decide to be captured by the apparently subtle features that mark this new canvas.
A group that doesn't seem to want to make a mistake with a record.