Pelican's newest release and their first for Southern Lord is a quick, three song 12" that swings gracefully through the tropes of heavy instrumental rock. Ephemeral is dusty and straightforward. It is free of noodling and epic run-on sentences and it hides a handful of riffs that give away the band's metal roots.
There is now an entire industry comprised of bands working metal's gloom and doom ambience without resorting to sketchy pentagrams and bloody axes on their album covers. For a long time, it was hard to find records this heavy without the trappings of metal's old scrawled-on-trapper-keeper aesthetic. There are plenty of bands still milking that too, but I'm glad that acts like Pelican can make heavy rock music without screeching vocals.
Ephemeral is perhaps little more than a prelude to a full length for Southern Lord, but it's a handy package of three great pieces that bring plenty of gutteral chug without the need for fancy pants orchestration or weepy synthesizer patches. What I love most about the record are those moments where the band slips into riff mode. The hard driving but steady rhythm that inspires simple head nodding through most of the songs gives way to full tilt devil horn pumping for mere seconds and it's in those moments that I'm glad that Pelican have not left the metal behind.
I grew up wanting to like metal because of its visceral attitude and combative disposition. I quickly found that most metal was too silly to take with a straight face, and that those bands who ground out slow, instrumental doom were perfect for shoe-gazing but not much else. Pelican sits happily inbetween—not quite beholden to the doom and drone, but not so enamored with acrobatic guitar solos as to seem trite and self-absorbed. Ephemeral features two new tracks and a cover of the Earth song "The Geometry of Murder" on which Earth songwriter Dylan Carlson sits in. I'm amped for the full length.
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