 Chicago
drone-heads that sound like the soupy innards of some guy that died in the
bathtub two weeks ago slowly glunking their way down the drain. Brooding
power and clanging discord make uneasy alliances, like high school misfits
out for an illicit smoke, on the outer edges of instrumental passages like
the vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding opener “Nightenday”, or the hypnotic
click-clack of "GW", before blowing sky-high into crashing waves of
sub-dermal dream machine music for epic, prog-metal crescendos. It’s
freak-head music, for sure, but less complicated then it seems, and more
concerned with beauty than madness. At times, it even sheds it’s thunder
lizard skin completely, as in the untitled fifth track, with it’s rootsy-acoustic
guitar and hazy whistling sound, which sounds more like a blissful day at
the beach then belching drug rock. It is, of course, immediately followed
by a wallop of forceful, Fudgetunnel-esque sludge metal, but you
kinda knew that was coming. Anyway, it would be overly simplistic to say
that Pelican remind me of 80’s indie-noise pioneers Squirrel
Bait, if Squirrel Bait knew how to shut up, and liked Black Sabbath
more than Husker Du, so to complicate things, take the
aforementioned description and add on something about Squirrel Bait
rewriting the soundtrack to El Topo while trundling across Eastern
Europe in box cars. Yep. Just like that. |