Tom Lynch

You have to hand it to Pelican—at least the band’s unafraid of pissing everyone off.

Chicago's smart, seamless instrumental four-piece opened eyes wide with 2003’s "Australasia," as the group ingeniously brought instrumental doom back to attention. That record’s follow-up, 2005’s "The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw," is a masterpiece of glacial destruction, the profound melody and thick, nearly impenetrable guitar work by Laurent Lebec and Trevor de Brauw inciting a slow-burning, aggressive riot. The instrumental post-metal spoke at volumes most bands with vocalists could never reach.

"City of Echoes," Pelican’s newest endeavor that was released at the beginning of June, again on Hydra Head Records, is a colossal departure, a seemingly blatant shun of everything that came before. But not necessarily in a bad way. The first noticeable difference is that the individual songs are much shorter than what we’re used to from the band—no more sprawling, repetitive ten-minute-plus numbers that were on-stage killers (the record’s longest track is just over seven minutes). The band sounds much lighter here as, make no mistake, this is a collection of pop songs, miles away from the metallic ruins explored on earlier records. The lone acoustic piece, like the mid-record "Winds with Hands," doesn’t even feature drums.

The change of direction is, at its base, admirable, but it's surely confusing to fans (this is not to say there wasn’t a difference between the first two records, either, but it was decidedly less drastic). While "The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw" remains Pelican’s best and most ambitious work, "City of Echoes" boasts a handful of highlights, and not in the parts that feature the "classic" Pelican sound. The title track, the longest on the record, is a melodic wailer, Lebec’s and de Brauw’s guitars intricately twisting in and out of each other. "Far from Fields," slotted later on the album, is a loud-quiet-loud number, catchy in its accessibility, strange in its slight tempo changes and intriguing, ever-so-gently, as the band includes an aping acoustic guitar. The song’s elegant breakdown, guitars chirping, and then transition, so smoothly, into headstrong drums, makes this song one of the best Pelican’s put to tape.

"I think the way it goes for us when we write a record, and definitely with the last two, we’ll kind of come out of an album and start writing tunes without a set direction," de Brauw says. "After we get a couple songs done, we’ll kind of have this revelation of what direction the material is going in…once we hear what the material is naturally doing, it kind of inspires us, and there’s a sudden burst of songs."

De Brauw says that the record’s themes were based on personal experiences the band had during its months and months on the road. "The material was shaped by the experience of touring," he says. "We wanted it to kind of tell a little bit of our lives on the road. The song titles are all [written] after stories we heard, or things we experienced on the road. ‘City of Echoes’ is a comment on the similarities between the places you go, in terms of globalization and the commercialization of culture. It’s like how one city is an echo of the one before it. But also, in a positive way, our music transcends these borders, we can go to Seattle or Portugal, and people appreciate our music."

Was the optimistic mood of the new record a set goal for the band? "We don’t really go into it consciously trying to write with a mood in mind," de Brauw says. "When certain elements of our lives are working out—we make a living off of the band—when you grow up with a dream like that, and you can’t possibly consider that it’s realistic, it’s so amazing just to be able to do this with our lives, it’s hard to focus negatively on anything."

The Herweg brothers, Larry (drums) and Bryan (bass), relocated to Los Angeles a short time ago, but de Brauw says it didn’t affect the songwriting negatively, as even before that, he and his wife lived in North Carolina for a spell. "My wife and I needed to get out of the city for a while," he says of the time. "We lived on a farm. But then I kind of got fed up with isolation, too. I was fed up with the city, but when I experienced the other side, I could appreciate all the great things about the city."

One might imagine the wild difference between "The Fire in Our Throats" and "City of Echoes" might make a difficult live set for the band, but de Brauw’s happy. "I think we’re in a good place right now," he says. "The new material is so diverse—the set feels like it flows."

Pelican plays August 24 at Beat Kitchen, 2100 West Belmont, (773)281-4444, at 7:30pm, $12, and August 25 at Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, (773)276-3600, at 10pm, $12.

(2007-08-21)

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