Last Minute Plans: Pelican Play First Show In 10 Months

By Jon Graef in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 18, 2013 6:00PM

Veteran instrumental metal band Pelican play their first show in 10 months tonight, April 18, at the Bottom Lounge.

Guitarist Trevor de Brauw wrote to Chicagoist to update us on the band's new material, which Pelican is set to lay down in June with Chris Common at Electrical Audio for a new full-length due out this fall.

The forthcoming record follows last year's Ataraxia/Taraxis EP, and will be Pelican's first long player since 2009's What We All Come to Need .

Also significant is that the new record with be the band's first without founding member Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who took an indefinite hiatus from the band last year. (His replacement is guitarist Dallas Thomas from fellow Chicago act The Swan King.)

Of the new material, de Brauw wrote the following:

This is our first show in about ten months because we've spent the bulk of the last year working on the new album, which we're recording in June. We're still polishing everything, but it seems [we have] an hour's worth of raw material right now. We applied some of file trading composition techniques we used on our last EP--but most of the songs got their start with us playing in a room together. It's definitely our most diverse album; it's musically all over the map, but the songs all have their own really distinct identity

For Ataraxia/Taraxis, the band composed each of the tracks by sending each other files digitally, which allowed the group to write despite the group not being located in one city (Half of the band lives in Los Angeles).

Here's what de Brauw said about the band's approach for the new full-length:

For the EP, there were a couple of tunes that we have literally never played together--we'd start with some rough recordings here and send them to [drummer Larry Herweg] in L.A. and he'd send back drum recordings and we'd build the songs on top of that. (Especially "Taraxis"). There was some of that this time around. But the stuff we've come up with in that fashion we've come back to, in person, and nailed down as a band.

Before you catch Pelican tonight at the Bottom Lounge with The Life and Times and Sweet Cobra, revisit "The Creeper," from What We All Come to Need .