pelican: what we all come to need (southern lord) vs. isis: wavering radiant (ipecac)
philosophically i hate the genre enthusiast. generally a bunchof taste nazis. see metal is what i grew up on, up with and (scene-wise) away from. reason being, as a pup, the willful cuntishness of yr reactionary fan on the street sometimes made me wish i’d never borrowed number of the beast or paranoid or master of puppets. the ficklest of the fickle; any hint of progression from a band slapped down as a move away from their metal roots towards big gay pop. exclamation mark. course it’s all changed hasn’t it? we’ve moved on from the days where covering nirvana meant death threats from the metal community? mogwai in kerrang. goatsnake in the wire. gabba in terrorizer. sunn o))) in the telegraph. it’s all one big musical melting pot innit?
i bring this up for a reason. pelican and isis released their last albums to a somewhat muted response. and by muted response i of course mean pissing and moaning on the internets. the plaintive cries from yr average cockbrained metal aficionado of ‘it’s gone all fucking quiet like pink fucking floyd…’ were heard, howling like maera over icarius’ corpse. i’m not particularly in favour of change for the sake of it but what was the last ac/dc record you actually honest to god liked?
if i’m being honest city of echoes and in the absence of truth ain’t my favourite pelican / isis sides. both had their moments but generally the records seemed occasionally strained and unfocussed, just didn’t gently tongue my neurons the way i like. so i was interested to see/hear what these new(ish) buggers sounded like.
don’t misunderstand me, while both bands may be from the same stock they are more like third cousins. but interesting parallels abound. both incorporate the reflective, progressive qualities of the previous moderately maligned albums. both hearken back to earlier material. both put a bit of a pop (relatively speaking) sheen on things. and aaron turner appears on both records.
moving to southern lord seems to have rejuvenated pelican. there’s a big fucking fire in the belly that seemed somewhat gaviscon dampened on city of echoes. there’s moments when the uber-amplification hits the thunderous chunder where kyuss and metallica venn-diagrammatically meet, particularly on the creeper with it’s stoner groove and metal bombast. and perhaps indicative of the sheer giddy glee of being a thousand stringed riff monster again is the fact greg anderson guest geetars on here.
there’s tunes, melodies amongst the australasia-esque heaviness, and the polite intricacies of city of echoes seem more at home here. there’s a sense of focus and purpose, confidence, indeed confidence enough to ease the record out with the rather pretty final breath which dares even to introduce vocals to this heady brew.
and this sense of purpose seems to have washed over the isis collective too. it’s their most concise album for a fucking age. they’ve taken their heavy grandiosity and sprinkled it with a strange psychedelic beauty. at times sounding like mastodon’s big brother or neurosis’ nephew. one might use the word prog if one didn’t fear being shouted down. but there’s an awkward elegance here among the tectonic hypnosis.
recording together (and with joe baressi this time round) seems to have added a whisky dash of warmbloodedness to the proceedings, something which at times is lacking from thissortofthing. and kindof like the pelican album it’s even catchy at points. the melodies curl through the panopticon-esque epic power with serpentinian grace. you could, if you dared, hum along to parts, though maybe not the seven and a half minute entirety of hall of the dead.
wavering radiant has that hypnotic grace and synapse hurting noise that the moodiest / heaviest of fennesz’ work has. it also has that earthy bruised psyche feel to it that neurosis do so well. so a recommendation of the highest order.
ps. if a tree falls in a forest and only metal fans are there to hear it, does it makes a noise like a drop d tuned ibanez and full marshall stack?
