Review/ Pelican: "What We All Come to Need"

A Drummer issue: Sheer mid-tempo-doom brutality.

Never pictured myself concurring with Pitchfork.com (and let’s just be clear that there’s nothing wrong with breathless, overblown rock journalism per se, so you shouldn’t hate Pitchfork just because they use big words – you can certainly hate them for attributing superpowers to regular-Joe slacker bands, but go ahead and try writing 1200-word CD reviews yourself and see how whacky you end up looking. It’s the quantity, not the quality, with those guys, so blame the zine’s insane slave-driving editor), but they nailed it an album or two ago when it comes to Pelican: their drummer is a huge failure.

Such a sad thing, because for this album the guitarists have come up with some riffs that’d compete with just about any band for sheer mid-tempo-doom brutality. Their trip is a singer-less one, though, and in order to make people forget that their competition, the drummer-led Don Caballero, is around also making singer-less albums, you need someone a smidge more interesting than a cut-rate Tommy Lee keeping boring, workaday time on a loose hi-hat.

These guys are just never gonna get it, and that’s such a shame – if they could find a singer like the guy from Crowbar it’d be a whole new ballgame.

By Eric Saeger

Homepage: Pelican
Homepage: Southern Lord Records