PELICAN with WOLVES in the THRONE ROOM 3/26/09 | the Casbah | San Diego, CA By Noah Barron Pelican, those venerable stirrers of bubbling metal sludge pots, are capable of getting their asses upstaged by the undercard. Upstart whelps Wolves in the Throne Room, Pelican's new labelmates on Southern Lord, flipped a few sweaty black wigs last night at the Casbah. After a rocky false start, some tuning shenanigans and equipment changes, (not to mention gratuitously theatrical lighting of motherfucking candelabras) Wolves in the Throne Room, mountain boys from Olympia, WA, kicked into a volcanic groove, coating the San Diego crowd with wave after murky wave of baroque filth.
Wolves in the Throne Room (henceforth WITTR), have a detached aggression thing going, a rageless intensity that informs their ornate, expansive jams. Supposedly, WITTR are these backwoods eco-radicals (rumor has it they formed at an Earth First! rally) interested in the transformative psychological power of their music. And in a way, it makes sense. Call it what you will: post-doom metal, ambient drone metal or whatever, but this is head music, not heart music or war music. Likewise, the metalheads in the crowd weren't colliding with each other or lifting their skinny fists like antennas to heaven, they were bobbing and bowing in woozy unison borne by WITTR's mesmeric throb. The scene looked like a gathering of ersatz Hasidim, bearded and black-clad, worshipping at the wailing wall of distortion.
Touring in support of their new full-length, "Black Cascade," WITTR manage to capture their ritualized primalism well on record, too. The recent album, recorded on tape and mixed on a primitive 70s Neve Electronics console, "Black Cascade" sounds like a viable answer to the black metal of Europe. Without the benefit of thousands of years of gothic, medieval and Viking history behind them, stateside acts have always struggled for the pathos enjoyed by their Scandinavian brethren. But WITTR have tapped into the dark heart of pre-colonial North America, coursing with sublime pagan fecundity—a sort of Hudson River School for the corpsepaint set. No such interesting ore can be mined from the steppes of buzzy Marshall amp squeal that Pelican galloped over during their hour-long set. As a project, Pelican seems to be moving away from their signature sound—odd time signatures and open minors hanging like doors broken off their hinges—and embracing a more plaintive and melody-oriented M.O. This evolution is most evident in the huge differences between 2005's gorgeous and miasmic "The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw" and 2007's "City of Echoes," a record my girlfriend described as instrumental emo.
This softer, janglier, poppier side was definitely on display at the Casbah, with newer material that sounded actually shiny—an adjective that rarely abuts descriptors like "drone" and "doom." Pelican's song structure has veered off the shoulder towards the middle of the road as well, with conventional verse/chorus formulations occasionally surfacing in the muck. The band has been jamming with 20-year doomcore veteran Dylan Carlson of Earth in preparation for a forthcoming EP, but this collab seems to have added some unwanted Alka-Seltzer to their sound. Pelican even did an Earth cover near the end of their set, which I'm pretty sure was "Geometry of Murder" off 1995's "Sunn Amps and Smashed Guitars" extended player.
In any case, the resulting performance is uneven and at times, outright boring. Now, of course "boredom" is a dirty word in drone music crit circles, since repetition and monotony are the genre's aesthetic stocks-in-trade, but you have to do something with your deployed boredom. Especially in the in-between moments after a big crescendo but before an intimate breakdown, Pelican was just up there noodling hazily without an idea behind them. And at midnight on a work night, three drinks deep and 14 minutes into a go-nowhere fuzz tangent, I found myself checking my watch. And there's nothing less metal than that. Maybe Wolves in the Throne Room, with their polished primacy and conceptual completeness, ruined us for the work-in-progress that is Pelican's current incarnation. But whatever the cause, the result was a less epic, more-poppy-but-still-aimless outing from a band that seems to be searching for what to do next. But perhaps, for decency's sake, the search ought to occur behind closed studio doors rather than in front of 50 dudes with skulls on their t-shirts.