Sunday, September 25, 2011

"City of Echoes" by Pelican

    Gone are the Melvins-esque drones of Pelican’s self-titled EP, the Neurosis-like brutality of Australasia, and the sensitivity of Isis on The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw.  Instead, the Chicago instrumental group’s third LP, City of Echoes, sounds like the album Judas Priest would have recorded after seeing Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro in 1994 and forgot to call Rob Halford. 
    Pelican’s first two albums were filled with post metal epics that averaged between eight and eleven minutes in length. Their EP March Into The Sea comprises of two songs, one of which is twenty minutes long.  On City of Echoes, the longest song is just seven minutes. This is not the same Pelican that recorded their prior albums.  Sure, the same members are all present, but in a different mindset. 
    Having built a reputation for powerful instrumentals which played out in beautiful narrative structures, Pelican have downplayed their style for a simpler sounding album. One noticeable difference is how the album jumps right into the first track “Bliss In Concrete”, a straightforward five and a half minutes of heavy riffing: unlike “Nightendday”, the first track on their heaviest album Australasia, which builds and builds to what essentially is an eleven minute jam session. 
    Rather than take us down a road with winds and turns, they choose the straight and narrow for a more generic rock record.  You certainly will find yourself bobbing yourself bobbing your head to many of the songs on here.  “Dead Between the Walls” is by far the bands catchiest song yet, while the acoustic “Winds With Hands” is just as energetic as any other song on the album.  But to call the album a “failure” in any way would be unfair to the band; they have openly said that they were going for a sound with more hooks and shorter songs while still writing large scale songs.  Guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec said that the band wanted to be able to play more songs in their 75 minute live sets rather than just five 15 minute songs.  City of Echoes plays more as an album best listened to while cruising with friends in a car on Saturday night; more specifically, it’d probably be one of the cassette tapes the characters in Wayne’s World had ready to throw on in the opening scene. 
    The final track, “A Delicate Sense of Balance”, shows that Pelican may find just that: balance.  This is a song which slowly grows from soft to loud in typical post metal fashion in five minutes. It is a summarized version of their typical style, which is exactly what the band set out to create. 
    With that said, City of Echoes is an album best taken with a grain of salt.  The heavy rockers are catchy, but the record doesn’t stretch much farther than that.  This is the sound of a band trying to explore their capabilities.  It’s not necessarily a bad album, it just isn’t a great Pelican album.

8 comments:

  1. I liked that you referenced one of the reasons their songs are shorter on this record (so they can play more of them live), and went through a brief history of their transformation as a band.

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  2. First of all, I love this record. This was well written, it was very believable that your words were sincere.

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  3. I couldn't really tell what your position was until the very sentence because it seemed quite neutral up until then. You start off sounding disappointed but then the second paragraph has a sort of understanding tone. Great descriptions and great review.

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  4. I read the intro thinking you were going to tear this apart but as I read on it seemed your position shifted more and more with every paragraph.

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  5. Great job, very well written. I liked how the brief band history you did gave an outsider an idea of what the band is all about

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  6. I liked that you went into a history of the band and gave the reader an idea of the sound of the album. I also really liked the last line 'It’s not necessarily a bad album, it just isn’t a great Pelican album. '

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  7. very unbiased it seemed. great layout. alot of talented bands these days seem to go in different directions, but its cool to see you still stick with them.

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  8. I felt that your stance was sincere and pretty clear. Made me want to sit down and do a comparison myself.

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