Pallbearer’s Brett Campbell on the long road to Mind Burns Alive ahead of Friday’s Bottleneck show

Pallbearer. // Courtesy of the artist

If you want to know what Arkansas doom metal quartet Pallbearer sounds like, look no further than the title of their 2012 debut, Sorrow and Extinction. Even as the band’s sound has evolved from lengthy, cyclical riffs to a wider sound that embraces elements of progressive rock, the heart of Pallbearer’s music has always been something inescapably sad, paired with a sense of impending destruction.

Their latest album, Mind Burns Alive, released last month via Nuclear Blast, but Kansas City audiences got to preview two songs last summer when the band played RecordBar as part of a short tour. At the time, we noted that the band seemed reinvigorated by the direction in which they were headed, and after listening to Mind Burns Alive on repeat the last month, we feel the same way.

Pallbearer returns to the area this Friday, June 28, at the Bottleneck, and we hopped on the phone with frontman Brett Campbell to discuss the new album and Pallbearer’s ever-evolving sound.

The Pitch:  What is it like talking about Mind Burns Alive after it took so much time for it to come to life?

Brett Campbell: Honestly, strange because how do you put like six years of work into basically what amounts to soundbites? It’s really tough and so, in interviews, I have a tendency to just go on and on about it ’cause it’s really hard to condense a very lengthy process that involved—it was a whole saga of ups and downs and the creative process. So yeah, it’s kind of difficult, although I’ve gotten better at it. I’ve been giving a lot of interviews about it. I have some, some kind of guideposts that I can lead myself to.

Folks in Kansas City were some of the few who got to hear a couple of these songs last summer when you played RecordBar and did “Signals” and “Endless Place.” Did getting to play those four shows help determine how you felt about it, or was it just nice to finally get them out there in front of people?

It was really nice just to get them out there, ’cause the songs had been recorded and stuff by then. They were done. I think that was the first show of the tour, right? So, yeah–aside from just the typical first show figuring out sound gremlins and stuff, it was cool.

We had played some of those songs here at home also last year, but that was the second time we played those songs live, so yeah, it was really cool, after sitting on these songs–not even sitting on it–after working on these songs for so long, it felt very gratifying to finally share them, because we’ve been really excited about them this whole time, otherwise we wouldn’t have persevered through everything to share them, get them out into the world.

We really believe in the songs. It was cool to finally share them with people and see their reaction to, to the new stuff.

How have you developed such a close connection to KC and Lawrence? It feels like Pallbearer has a home here.

Yeah, it’s always felt like that. We’ve been playing there a long time. It’s geographically not that far away. It feels like it’s got a similar vibe–small, but it’s got a cool music history there, much like Little Rock. I feel like there’s a lot of similarities in terms of the attitudes of people there, so I’ve always felt very at home there.

You even had “The Ghost I Used to Be” in a film that came out of Kansas City called I Am Lisa, which was one of the appealing things for me about that movie. I was just like, “Oh, man, all these bands I like are in it,” but yeah, it just seems like KC and Lawrence really love Pallbearer.

Yeah, and the feeling’s mutual. It’s been really cool playing there and I always look forward to it.

This is a weird technical question, but given the length of some of your songs, how is it trying to slot in new songs when you can only fit so much into a set?

It’s tough. That’s partially what the ethos behind Forgotten Days was, and why we wrote some shorter songs on that album. It was just so we could more songs in a set just to give people more songs but we’ve just come to terms with the fact that that’s just the nature of our music and most of our songs are above-average length, so we just have to pick.

I think there are certain songs that we’re sort of chained to. People would potentially drag us out in the street if we don’t play “The Ghost I Used To Be” or “Foreigner,” so we almost always play those two songs, and there’s a couple others that we tend to play. But other than that, we just try to mix it up and as much as we can have something from each album.

This next tour is definitely going to lean heavily into new material, but we’re also playing several old songs too. I think it’s a nice blend. If you have a favorite album, if you’ve come to one of our shows, we will play something from it, probably but of course, we’re most interested in playing the new stuff because it’s newest. That’s where we’re at. That’s closer to where we’re at as musicians right now.

The band has always had eye-catching album covers. What is the story behind the cover art for Mind Burns Alive? It’s not quite as direct as some of the past album covers.

Totally. I mean, it’s the first time we’ve used a photograph, as opposed to a painting. We’ve always used paintings in the past. A few years ago, I think, we mentioned the idea of using a photograph for an upcoming album because it would be different with no real destination of what that was supposed to be, just the loose concept of doing that.

We floated that idea and when came to start designing the artwork for this album, Joe [Rowland, bass/synths/vocals] and I came up with a visual concept as we have always done in the past. We started working with an artist and the results were cool, but it just didn’t feel right for the material. It was too–I don’t know, it had a level of bombast and that didn’t seem to reflect the stripped-down and more-reserved nature of some of this material. It made it seem more fantastical than it needed to be when it needed to feel more grounded, but still surreal.

I started searching for artists and photographers, and I found one artist online, just on Instagram, who I really liked. I showed his work to the rest of the band, and they liked this stuff too, but none of us could agree on which piece we liked, so we reached an impasse.

So we send it to Simon [Henderson, design/layout] ’cause he’s got really great taste as well and we’ll bounce ideas off to him. He’s also got a wider knowledge of fine art and stuff than we do. He’s a fancier boy than we are. He’s the one who eventually found the artist that we used [Bill Armstrong]. He suggested it based on the photos I had found of the artist. The photographer he found was in a similar vein, and as soon as he sent that photo, we were just like, “Oh, this is perfect.”

It’s not fire, but it looks like fire, right? Until you look at it closely and it’s a person thinking they’re upside down and this is the perfect visual representation for this batch of songs and what they’re about. So yeah, props to Simon for that one.

I love the different stuff you’ve done on Mind Burns Alive. The saxophone works in a way where I was just like, “Oh yeah, of course. This is the perfect thing for this.” What made you want to step further outside what people might think a Pallbearer album sound sounds like these days?

That’s an interesting way to ask that question. I like that. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to, it’s just that we never even consider doing anything otherwise. Our creative process is pretty untethered, much like our brains, but like no, I mean if we think something’s gonna enhance a song, I think we respect our audience enough to hope or assume that they will come along for the ride.

The way that that part just came about was just a last-minute suggestion. I think it was Mark, I can’t remember, but one of us suggested, “What if our friend Norman [Williamson] plays sax?” He’s our friend from here in town and he’s really talented saxophonist. It was just a last-minute addition. After years of meticulously honing these songs, at the very last minute we just added this really dramatic change to a song.

Sometimes, it’s the right thing to do. And as soon as that suggestion emerged, we’re like, “Oh yeah, that would be so cool,” and he just came in and killed it. Knocked it out. He did three or four takes and they were all killer. I think any one of them could have worked.

We’re talking about a week out from the tour starting. What have been your preparations and what are you looking forward to? You’re going to be out for a while.

Yeah. It’s going to be the longest tour we’ve done in quite some time. Also, we haven’t headlined in a long time. The Heartless era, I guess, we did a co-headlining thing in Europe with Elder, but we haven’t properly headlined in a long time. So, yeah, we’ve been rehearsing quite a bit.

I have this new way of routing my guitar that I’m excited to bring into a live setting. I’ve been obsessively working on this setup for months. I have individual patches for each song so I can get pretty close to our studio representations of the guitar sounds in a live setting. I’m very excited. I’m more excited to bring the sounds to an audience than I ever have.

I think it’s going to be really cool, or it’s going to be a disaster. I don’t know. I haven’t found out yet, but I mean, so far in practice, it sounds cool. It’s just more moving parts, more shit that can go wrong, but. I do think it’s gonna be awesome, based on the rehearsals. Everything sounds really good, and I know this is a standard thing for bands to say, but I genuinely think that we sound better than we ever have. I’d be honest and say if I thought we sounded worse.

Pallbearer plays the Bottleneck this Friday, June 28, with REZN and the Keening. Details on that show here.