CITY OF ECHOES

No more sludge. Pelican altered their sound al last – and I’m happy that they did it! To be honest, at the moment I can’t say I like their previous works – they just seem too heavy and doomy to me. City Of Echoes is completely different album – yes, there are a lot of heavy riffs on it, but they are just not as heavy as they used to be; but then Pelican managed to make their music more beautiful and peculiar.

Perhaps, City Of Echoes is not a masterpiece of progressive rock as a whole, but it’s definitely a masterpiece within the bounds of Post-Rock and just refined music. It’s a genuine masterpiece for me personally as well.

1. Bliss In Concrete (10/10). Oh, what a wonderful song. Here we have a very beautiful beginning, which gracefully gets heavier at 1:12. Then, this song contains various and memorizable riffs and wonderful guitars. 2. City Of Echoes (10/10). Almost the same structure here – mellow intro, which turns to heavy tunes at 1:00, and again Pelican did it very elegantly! The guitarists are perfectly co-ordinated – both the guitars play different tunes, but in whole it sounds very deliberately. 3. Spaceship Broken-Parts Needed (9/10). Again we can hear very gentle and slow intro. Here there are a lot of very heavy (in the vein of Pelican of the old days) riffs, but they are not as inspired as the riffs from the previous songs. 4. Wind With Hands (10/10). Oh, this is probably my favourite acoustic song by Pelican. As a matter of fact, this song isn’t difficult/complex at all, but I’m just moved when listening to the song each time… 5. Dead Between The Walls (9/10). This song is a bit heavier than the previous ones – more Post-Metal here; but nonetheless I like it. 6. Lost In The Headlights (10/10). The intro reminds me of Tool a bit. When the song reaches 2:10 we can hear (again) very gentle and beautiful guitars, which almost move me in tears… It’s too hard to explain, you just need to listen to it and to get into it. 7. Far From Fields (10/10) is one more nice song with a nice acoustic change at 1:00. Well, I just want to say that the music here is very thought-out and cohesive, that’s why I love all the songs from the album. 8. A Delicate Sense Of Balance (8/10) is a nice ending of the album, but it seems a bit boring and repetitive to me.

Well, City Of Echoes is the best Pelican album to date, IMHO. You can call it easy-listening, relaxing, boring, slow, as you like – but if you listen attentively to it you’ll fall in love with it for good.

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