Pelican – The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw

1. Last Day Of Winter
2. Autumn Into Summer
3. March To The Sea
4. Red Ran Amber
5. Aurora Borealis
6. Sirius
“When not outright dismissive, reviews of instrumental rock (a/k/a “instru-metal”) tend toward the hyperbolic. Maybe the stab at heightened language highlights an attempt to pad the lacking libretto; or perhaps without voices covering-up aspects of the instrumentation, we subconsciously connect the work to pure nonhuman landscapes like towering mountains and multilayered constellations, et al. Whatever the case, the guys of don’t need fancy prose because the Chicago quartet aims for such oxygen-free highs that any over-the-top words I scribble are more or less a reenactment of what they’ve put to tape.”
“”Epic” is the single most overused word in the context of notey crews like Don Caballero (or Battles), Red Sparowes, and Isis: It finds its way into discussion out of habit, but it’s hard to prove via any visible calculations what’s truly deserving of the descriptor and what’s just fucking long. On their sophomore full-length, certainly know how to go for broke and then continue going and going and going. But are they really worthy of being linked to the Odyssey? Three of the seven tracks here last for more than 10 minutes, one’s just under 10, and the other three each tread at around five. In many cases, enjamb enough dynamic shifts into the compositions to keep things interesting, or at least varied, but I’m still searching for a final explosion.”
“A plus: Unlike many instrumentalists, don’t affix over-long stage-direction-style titles to their compositions. Besides the dorky album title (wait– you guys never speak, so we’re gonna freeze forever? is that the hook?), they let their music do the talking. Song-by-song there’s a tendency toward seasonal shifts and the sky: “Last Day of Winter”, “Autumn Into Summer”, “Aurora Borealis”, and “Sirius”. And while the songs don’t necessarily sound like their tags, they at least plant a generality in the listener’s head.”
“Those are the structures. It’s more difficult explaining exactly what it actually sounds like. For starters, despite critical fixations to the contrary, Fire… isn’t very metal. The heavier/murkier debut, “Australasia”, was certainly within that realm and fit the critical shorthand, but here the production’s ultra clean (sorta pristine), the atmosphere’s airy (check out those acoustic transitions), and the songs delve into poppier areas than anything they’ve done in the past. Maybe it’s safer to evoke Oren Ambarchi jamming with Trans Am.”
“Coming up with proper genre identification’s difficult, but diagramming the specific’s of each song’s even rougher (cataloguing the twists and turns of each track requires college-level geometry). To speak in the vaguest terms, their attack falls into two over-arching camps: They either riff through those aforementioned “epics” or drop-off more incidental sounding shortish pieces.”
“The strongest marathon, “March Into The Sea”, just under 12 minutes long, is the most “metal.” There’s nimble double bass drum and an interestingly treated cymbal crash. It’s less atmospheric than some of the others. The first thought in my head, “Spacious Fucking Champs”. Late in the track there’s a sort of break down into pretty, jangling arpeggios. You know how Slash would always play his solos in the middle of the desert or something during those Guns-n-Roses videos? Well, “March Into The Sea” deserves to be unleashed in such extreme conditions. On the other hand, “Red Ran Amber”, which begins promisingly with patented Unwound-style feedback, wanders into a whirlpool at some point and forgets to re-emerge.”
“Amongst the briefer bits (spaghetti western, underwater surf music), the best (and most surprising) is the untitled fourth piece, a pile of moody acoustic Gypsy strumming with shaker percussion. Here, the instruments feel like they’ve