Pitchfork

When not outright dismissive, reviews of instrumental rock (a/k/a "instru-metal") tend toward the hyperbolic. Maybe the stab at heightened language highlights an attempt to pad the lacking libretto; or perhaps without voices covering-up aspects of the instrumentation, we subconsciously connect the work to pure nonhuman landscapes like towering mountains and multilayered constellations, et al. Whatever the case, the guys of Pelican don't need fancy prose because the Chicago quartet aims for such oxygen-free highs that any over-the-top words I scribble are more or less a reenactment of what they've put to tape.

"Epic" is the single most overused word in the context of notey crews like Don Caballero (or Battles), Red Sparowes, and Isis: It finds its way into discussion out of habit, but it's hard to prove via any visible calculations what's truly deserving of the descriptor and what's just fucking long. On their sophomore full-length, Pelican certainly know how to go for broke and then continue going and going and going. But are they really worthy of being linked to the Odyssey? Three of the seven tracks here last for more than 10 minutes, one's just under 10, and the other three each tread at around five. In many cases, Pelican enjamb enough dynamic shifts into the compositions to keep things interesting, or at least varied, but I'm still searching for a final explosion.

A plus: Unlike many instrumentalists, Pelican don't affix over-long stage-direction-style titles to their compositions. Besides the dorky album title (wait-- you guys never speak, so we're gonna freeze forever? is that the hook?), they let their music do the talking. Song-by-song there's a tendency toward seasonal shifts and the sky: "Last Day of Winter", "Autumn Into Summer", "Aurora Borealis", and "Sirius". And while the songs don't necessarily sound like their tags, they at least plant a generality in the listener's head.

Those are the structures. It's more difficult explaining exactly what it actually sounds like. For starters, despite critical fixations to the contrary, Fire... isn't very metal. The heavier/murkier debut, Australasia, was certainly within that realm and fit the critical shorthand, but here the production's ultra clean (sorta pristine), the atmosphere's airy (check out those acoustic transitions), and the songs delve into poppier areas than anything they've done in the past. Maybe it's safer to evoke Oren Ambarchi jamming with Trans Am.

Coming up with proper genre identification's difficult, but diagramming the specific's of each song's even rougher (cataloguing the twists and turns of each track requires college-level geometry). To speak in the vaguest terms, their attack falls into two over-arching camps: They either riff through those aforementioned "epics" or drop-off more incidental sounding shortish pieces.

The strongest marathon, "March Into the Sea", just under 12 minutes long, is the most "metal." There's nimble double bass drum and an interestingly treated cymbal crash. It's less atmospheric than some of the others. The first thought in my head, "Spacious Fucking Champs." Late in the track there's a sort of break down into pretty, jangling arpeggios. You know how Slash would always play his solos in the middle of the desert or something during those Guns-n-Roses videos? Well, "March Into the Sea" deserves to be unleashed in such extreme conditions. On the other hand, "Red Ran Amber", which begins promisingly with patented Unwound-style feedback, wanders into a whirlpool at some point and forgets to re-emerge.

Amongst the briefer bits (spaghetti western, underwater surf music), the best (and most surprising) is the untitled fourth piece, a pile of moody acoustic Gypsy strumming with shaker percussion. Here, the instruments feel like they've been lassoed into closer quarters. Queensryche fans might cry "Silent Lucidity", but the rest of us will note that toward the end things crackle for a moment and then fingers on strings make discordant noises briefly. If you didn't know better, this might be Espers or Ben Chasny doing the backstroke through tiny wafts of radio fuzz.

By and large, Pelican keep things moving. Still, at certain moments my attention wandered and I couldn't help but wonder who would be their ideal singer if they held their own "Rock Star: INXS" reality show. Truth is, the attack plateaus here/there, and just then it'd be excellent to introduce a screamer or sigher to push the elements toward that final Wagnarian movement that finds our aching, B-12 deficient hero climbing a mountain to embrase his (or her) too-lost love. My votes: The guys from Mineral and St. Vitus (as a team), King Diamond (solo), the woman in Evanescence, or the father from "The Sound of Music". Vocal-free, they never quite pull off that snow-capped climax.