THE FIRE IN OUR THROATS WILL BECKON THE THAW

Pelican's brand of post-metal reminds me a lot of Mogwai - there's the same mixture of sparse sterility and threadbare raggedness, like an abandoned hospital. With The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, they've greated an album that aspires to be just as haunting and fragile as Mogwai's excellent Ten Rapid (and in its best moments manages it), with just enough metallic roar to it to keep it on the metal side of the post-rock/post-metal divide (which as the 2000s went on got thinner and thinner). It got a lot of comparisons to Isis's Panopticon when it came out, and I don't think it's quite as good as that album, but in its better moments it comes pretty close to it. The main deficiency is that Pelican don't quite assert enough personality to distinguish them from the crowd, particularly in the context of the mid-2000s post-metal boom.