Album Details

• Artist: Pelican
• Album: What We All Come To Need
• Label: Southern Lord
• Year of Release: 2009
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2009-10-23

Pelican are Pelican, but more. Massive instrumental tracks that build off of a few droning riffs, occasionally more heavy but often more prog-like than the bands they get compared to. "What We All Come To Need" can be ponderous, but it still works. The band's tightly controlled brooding remains as affecting and somehow uplifting as usual.

Guitarist Laurent Lebec has even invited some of the competition to sit in here and there on this first release for Southern Lord. Representatives of SunnO))), Isis, and The Life & Times of Shiner make this a sort of stoner-metal summit meeting, but always with the constantly refining Pelican sound as the source. Songs like "The Creeper, "An Inch Above Sand" and the title track hint at looking for connections in a world increasingly devoid of feeling, at least that is what the music suggests. Pelican always manage to edge close to ripping into a tired Stoner motif but then veering off into a delicate, light drone that makes lyrics irrelevant. Having said this, there are some brief vocals on the final track, "Final Breath," by Allen Epley (The Life & Times of Shiner), but they are brief and don't' really add much.

By this, the fourth Pelican release, the band may find that just by the nature of their chosen genre that their sound is either getting redundant or deeper. "What We All Come To Need" expresses the latter. While not offering anything radically new, Pelican finds new colors in its drones to play with, to explore, and to lift up.

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