Pelican - Nighttime Stories

Pelican was one of the first metal bands that I really got into.  Their instrumental post-metal was a pretty easy addition/transition from the post-hardcore bands like Thrice that I was listening to in high school, and their huge riffs and intense sonic landscapes were, ahem, instrumental in getting me into other types of metal as well.  2005's The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw is in my All-Time Top Ten, and each of their albums has had some kind of effect on me upon its release.  That said, 2007's City of Echoes is the last Pelican album I unequivocally love; 2009's What We All Come to Need and 2013's Forever Becoming certainly have incredible moments ("Ephemeral" and "The Creeper" from the former are easily two of the best songs the band has written).  So when word reached that the newest Pelican album, Nighttime Stories, would be released on June 7th, I was excited, but perhaps not as excited as I would have been a decade ago.  Was I just growing apart from one of my favorite bands, one of the bands who shaped my tastes in metal, performers of some of the best concerts I've ever attended?  Or has Pelican lost a step, losing whatever alchemy the band had in the first decade of the century and replacing it with something lesser?

Eagle Twin - The Thundering Heard

Since their debut full-length The Unkindness of Crows in 2009, Eagle Twin has quietly been one of my favorite bands.  ...Crows was like nothing I had ever heard when it came out; the band's shamanistic take on doom is weird and adventurous in a way that too little music is.  That weirdness was somehow pushed even further on The Feather Tipped the Serpent's Scale, the band's 2012 follow up, resulting in an album that still rewards listens with the discovery of something new.  Now, six years later, Eagle Twin has returned with The Thundering Heard (Songs of Hoof and Horn); after such a lengthy slumber, can Eagle Twin muster the same thundering weirdness that made them so hypnotically intoxicating?

Pelican - Forever Becoming

It’s been four years since Pelican’s most recent full-length, 2009’s What We All Come to Need, and the band has made some changes since then. The most obvious change is new guitarist Dallas Thomas, who joined the band last year after founding guitarist Laurent Shroeder-Lebec stepped down. The more nuanced change occurred in the band’s music; 2012’s Attaraxia/Taraxis EP had a much more rock-oriented feel than the doomy atmospherics and crushing riffs of previous efforts by the band. With the emergence of other instrumental bands such as Animals as Leaders, Scale the Summit, and Russian Circles in recent years, many feared Pelican was in danger of becoming an also-ran instead of a leader in the music community.