Pelican & Russian Circles
Two bands with similar outlooks and inhabiting similar musical territory both serve up new albums this month but achieve quite different results.
Pelican follow up 2007’s magnificent ‘City Of Echoes’ with ‘What We All Come To Need’. On the surface of it, the record ticks all the right boxes. It’s brutal, aggressive and powerful yet almost entirely without surprises, and for this reason somehow falls strangely flat.
That’s not to say it’s a poor album, far from it, it’s just that it seems this is their Metallica ‘Black Album’ moment. All of the rough edges that made their earlier work so compelling have been polished away so that what remains, however powerful the sound, just sounds a bit samey and uninspired.
The drumming, always a point of contention amongst Pelican fans, has improved beyond measure which should be a good thing and yet this is somehow symptomatic of how overproduced the sound has become. The tracks bleed in to one another without anything for the listener to be able to discern one from another.
At the other end of the spectrum is fellow Chicagoites Russian Circles with their third full lengther ‘Geneva’. While Russian Circles certainly occupy the same field as Pelican with this record they are ploughing a very different furrow.
The record opens with ‘Fathom’, a dark and brooding number packed with tension, before moving seamlessly on to one of the albums most standout moments, the title track ‘Geneva’. This is aggression with purpose; it swings at the listener with malice and lands every blow.
From then on we are taken on an Orphean descent through the circles of Hades, dark moods and muscular riffs assault the unwary musical traveller until the record climaxes in the epic one-two of ‘When The Mountain Comes To Muhammed’, which finds the band about as quiet and contemplative as they get and builds to an awe inspiring crescendo, and then ‘Philos’.
‘Philos’, what can I say about this piece of musical exquisiteness? Ten and a half minutes of slow burning, grandiose majesty and worth the entrance fee all on its own. Muse take note, this is how you write epic rock music without sounding like wankers.
So there you go, two albums sown from the same seeds yet one growing up merely good whilst the other has blossomed in to something wonderful
Pelican released October 19 on Southern Lord and Russian Circles released October 26 on Suicide Squeeze