CITY OF ECHOES

This is my first encounter with this band, and I have a few mixed feelings towards them. I think the are an excellent example of control in a metal band, precise musicianship, excellently structured songs, and completely non pretentious, except the drummer! As a drummer he is very skilled, but the fact that he is doing crazy measure long fills and overdoing the beats is SO contradicting to the band. This is a group that fights against the metal, where everyone in the band is absolutely crazy, doing whatever they want whenever, and yet the drummer cant control himself at all, sad. Anyways about the music...

Like most post rock, the recording is a bit shoddy, but I was completely ready for this. The only major recording flaws are the lack of bass, but the rythym guitar is playing every note of the bass line for most of the album, so that can be a reason. Most of the songs are very much the same, but are all quite interesting, and are really nice just for some ambient noise, or to concentrate on for a while. One of my favirote things they use (or dont use) are power chords. It seems that every note played by the guitars are strictly single notes, which is very nice if your tired of the same old drop D guitar sawing. The only setback to this style of playing is that it's hard for the song to build and climax, but I guess the excessive drumming and crazy arppegios help out that flaw quite a bit. My favirote songs are City of Echoes, spaceship broken, dead between the walls and a delicate sense of balance.

The songs are built as if they would have words, leading to some dull moments. The flow of the album is generally, heavy song, soft and slightly poppy, heavy, plus or minus the acoustic song. Most of the songs start out with a soft or heavy guitar witch quickly builds. Then the song escalates to a very fast mid section with some high flying and beautiful arpeggios, and crazy double kick. The ending sections are almost unanimously the same, all slow down, the rythym guitar is no longer distorted, the lead is still doing some sweetly saturated presicion picking, and the drums usually stay quite obnoxious. After listening to the album a couple of times, it gets very predictable and boring, but some songs stay affloat. City of Echoes is probably the most impressive song, because, there is always a twist in the song, and it reaches multiple climaxes.

Overall, I was impressed, but not to the point where I was ecstatic about the album. It lacks a certain poise, that most classic albums have. The best thing about this album is the precise note hitting by the guitars, everything the lead guitar does is very pretty and excact. As for the worst thing about the album, is it's repetitiveness, like I said, it gets very tedious and predictable after a couple of listens. I do believe that Pelican does have a lot potential they have yet to tap on that they will find in the next album or two.

3***