Looking to throw your heavy metal claws aloft and mindlessly bellow “Yeaahhhhh!” at the rafters? That’s fine and all, but chances are this is not the doom you are looking for. Mind Burns Alive is Pallbearer’s most expansive and atypical work to date, and while the band have long exhibited restless, wayward traits, they’ve largely been kept in check by the steady whip hand of doom traditionalism.
Here, on the band’s fifth album, that resolve is beginning to waver. They’ve not done away with the crunch entirely, but quiet restraint is now the name of the game, and those thumps to the back of the head are tempered by prog, synths, sax and slowcore. Not unlike Patrick Walker’s journey from Warning to 40 Watt Sun, Pallbearer have managed to maintain a sense of pile-driving emotional weight, even when the music murmurs.
