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This is still insanely large-sounding music, and is heavy in the extreme, but its new tenets give listeners more to hold on--and perhaps dream on--than simply low-tuned, ponderous riffing.
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What we’ve all come to need is balance and perspective before death, and Pelican provides that with perfect precision.
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Alternative PressWhat We All Come To Need finds Pelican mastering their post-metal craft while indulging the ambitious curiousities that hinted at on 2007's "City Of Echoes."
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Having established the hypnotic power of loud, dense guitar marches long ago, Pelican sound free enough at last to explore melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play without hewing to the old layer of protective gloom.
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UncutPelican don't look like metal kids - however, their ruminative riffology and ability to raise apocalyptic visions mark them out as practitioners of a new, reflective metallurgy alongside the likes of Sun0)))'s Stephen O' Malley. [Jan 2010, p. 123]
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What We All Come to Need is a largely successful display of Pelican’s well-defined sound with the invigoration of guest star peers and promising glimmers of growth.
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Though there’s nothing startlingly new here, this is a consistently engaging record that doesn’t so much successfully straddle metal and post-rock than have both coursing through its veins.
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The guitars are huge. The drumming is fine. But the disc falls a few inches shy of the group’s tantalizingly elusive potential.
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Over all the album is pretty decent and enjoyable in its context. When it feels mediocre, it’s because the ideas, which once made this band and many post-metal bands so ahead of their time, have been caught up to.
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Divest the Smashing Pumpkins or Hum of their singers, give the bands room to jam, and this album might have ensued. Without vocals, it feels slightly empty.