Pelican

The 30-minute EP Pelican (Hydra Head, 2003) contains four terrifying instrumental pieces a` la Boris and Earth. The 13-minute The Woods improves over the role models by coupling a steady beat and oneiric overtones. The combination creates the ideal launching pad for the abrupt explosions and crescendoes and, more importantly, lays the foundations for a series of melodic passages before the final onslaught of power riffs. If Pulse and Mammoth are the typical Black Sabbath-esque orgies of loud dark riffs, Forecast For Today is full of life and detours, almost dissonant through its limping seesawing pace; and, again, what sets them apart from the legions of doom-metallers is the ability to introduce a melodic element (that gets repeated faster and faster in a frenzied finale).

The all-instrumental Australasia (Hydra Head, 2003) was the manifesto of their progressive metal that takes off from post-rock and sails towards the droning avantgarde. The incandescent stream of consciousness of the eleven-minute Night And Day begins in the realm of atonal chamber music before the ritual mega-riff propels it to Black Sabbath's paradise. Here one guitar modulates a stately drone while the other intones a rootsy melody. They interrupt each other with jagged, discordant and oblique passages. The drums bring the rhythm down and the guitars shift to a more subdued tone, while the asymmetric drumming manouver moves to the forefront. Finally the guitars recover their riffing power, sometimes echoing more the Allman Brothers than Earth or Boris.
The panzer pace of Drought, created by one guitar resonating with the other on the bass notes, drifts towards a series of subtle variations at a slightly faster tempo, but this time the guitar inventions flow seamlessly.
Angel Tears, the third pillar of the album and the one that feels most improvised, is the least distinctive because the slow, meandering beginning never quite attains a strong identity, with the guitars undecided on which route to take and the drums playing almost independently.

The impressionistic jams of The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw (Hydra Head, 2005) are even more removed from the stereotypes of heavy metal. Last Day of Winter (9:36) may start out with a bluesy theme, but it soon becomes more concerned with penning an abstract soundscape of loose guitar tones and sparse beats, as if they had taken one of the previous album's massive pieces and remixed it in the vein of glitch music. Then the instruments concoct a crescendo of sorts, but it sounds like they are simply all banging together.
The transition of Autumn into Summer (10:44) from tranquil new-age pointillism to loud and clunky metal riffing is instead gracefully choreographed. The crescendo is a model of surgical precision and group coordination, each note and each beat contributing to the overall drift.
The apocalyptic March to the Sea (11:37), perhaps their artistic zenith, employs a similar process to build up a Mogwai-like tidal wave of instrumental sounds but then begins to slowly undo it, a complementary process that reveals the hidden melody. That process eventually implodes to the point that the guitars are merely strumming skeletons of melodies to each other. Then the process reverses itself again, and the tidal wave is progressively reconstructed, more menacing than ever. (The EP version is 20-minute long).
Red Ran Amber (11:20) is another study in organic development that truly starts from the minute of collective noise, after which the music decays to a humble whisper only to slowly regroup and accelerate towards an epic ending.
The brief Sirius (5:47) that closes the album might actually be the heaviest piece on the album.

Pelican's journey away from heavy metal led to City Of Echoes (Daymare, 2007), that often sounded like a heavier version of Midwestern post-rock of the 1990s (Slint, Shellac, Don Caballero, June Of 44).

The EP Ephemeral (Southern Lord, 2009) and the album What We All Come To Need (Southern Lord, 2009) moved towards a more accessible and vastly less interesting sound. who had never heard the previous albums.

Pelican's guitarist Trevor Shelley-de Brauw pushed the hyper-doom ideology to its ultimate extreme on Chord's Flora (2009), an album of four songs, each played on a single chord, and on their ambient tour de force Progression (Important, 2011), that contains the 40-minute Gm11 (the title is the chord).

The four pieces of the EP Ataraxia (2012) are unusually subdued, focusing on textures and technicalities rather than on swelling polyphony.

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