Pelican, the instrumental quartet whose singular vision of heavy music eschews classification, announced their new LP Nighttime Stories to be released for June 7 via Southern Lord Recordings. This will be the group’s first full length in six years. Nighttime Stories features eight tracks and marks the band’s first release written entirely with guitarist Dallas Thomas, who took over the guitar job after founding member Laurent Schroeder-Lebec’s left in 2012.
The creative process in writing the album, considered the most potent worker of their lengthy nineteen-year career, was guided by a slew of realizations, tragedies and glimmers of optimism. Nighttime Stories steers towards a darker tone characteristic of Pelican’s early songwriting as the songs recall everything from the triumphant call-to-arms of classic Dischord, to the vicious troglodyte battery of the Melvins to the dynamic interwoven melodies of bottom-heavy indie cult heroes Chavez.
Nighttime Stories was initially proposed for Tusk, the hallucinatory art-art-grind band that included Pelican member Trevor Shelley de Brauw, Larry Herweg, Schroeder-Lebec and Jody Minnoch. The album writing began shortly after Minnoch’s unexpected death in 2014. Some of the dark psychedelic structures that were characteristic of Tusk’s sound began to unconsciously inform the album’s direction. As the writing of Nighttime Stories progressed, Thomas also experienced a heavy loss with the passion of his father, to whom the album pays tribute on the opening track of “W.S.T.”
Pelican has proved that they can make both the sounds of metal underground and the more delicate and nuanced sounds work through the art of contrast. Nighttime Stories swings the pendulum back to the angst and ire of their younger years. Pelican is to set out on a ten date US tour in June with more dates to come.
Track List
- WST
- Midnight and Mescaline
- Abyssal Plain
- Cold Hope
- It Stared at Me
- Nighttime Stories
- Arteries of Blacktop
- Full Moon, Black Water
Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat
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