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Pelican with Russian Circles, Young Widows and Ampline
Thursday · Mad Hatter
Instrumental Punk/Prog quartet Pelican took flight nearly seven years ago in the gloomy, lake-effect bone chill of Chicago. When they first assembled, the foursome (guitarists Trevor de Brauw and Laurent Lebec, bassist Bryan Herweg, drummer Larry Herweg) had a thought to combine the spontaneity and fury of Punk with the sonic grandeur and expanse of Prog, and they worked toward that end for the better part of a year before ever venturing onto a stage or into a studio. During that embryonic phase, none of the band’s members stepped into a vocalist’s role and they continued along wordlessly with the idea that eventually they would find a voice to match their musical aspirations.
By the time of Pelican’s first shows in 2001, no such vocalist had been discovered and so the quartet introduced themselves to their audience as an instrumental outfit, a status they have maintained through their EPs, split releases, a pair of live DVDs and a trio of exceptional full lengths: 2003’s Australasia, 2005’s The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw and their latest, City of Echoes, which will hit the racks on May 22.
Although Pelican did not begin with any kind of conscious “no vocals/no lyrics” manifesto, they have slowly grown to embrace the concept, perpetuating their newfound instrumental “mission” while remaining at least somewhat open to the idea of adding words to the mix at some necessary juncture. With acknowledged influences that run the gamut from King Crimson to Yes to The Ramones, the members of Pelican concoct a sonic gale force wind, an apt metaphor as a good number of the band’s compositions are inspired by and reflect their attitudes toward the natural world. They are also the most psychotically busy musicians, dividing their time between Pelican and no less than four other working bands (Tusk, Teith, Lair of the Minotaur and Historie) where they work out their creative kinks by exploring genres like Metal and Grindcore.
If you’re looking for the universe’s truths to be revealed in actual lyrics, move along. If you want to be swept away on a visceral wave of wordless Punk/Prog power, Pelican has arrived. (Brian Baker)
Chuck Prophet with Alejandro Escovedo
Saturday · Southgate House
Chuck Prophet couldn’t have invented a more appropriate surname if he’d thought it up himself.
From the very beginning, Prophet has always been slightly ahead of the trend curve, pursuing new and challenging styles of music long before they become commercially viable and critically acceptable. After founding Green on Red during the Paisley Underground scene in the ’80s, he shifted the band’s focus from Velvet Underground worshippers to rootsy Americana fuzzkickers, long before many people gave much thought to cross-pollinating Country and Rock in the Indie community. It was a move that guaranteed him a slavish cult audience and virulent obscurity. He continued along the same path once he departed from GOR for a solo career and received a cold shoulder from the music industry; unable to secure a domestic label deal for his early solo work in the ’90s, Prophet was forced to release his albums overseas, making them available in the U.S. only as imports.
When American labels finally started paying attention to Prophet, his restless creative spirit found him experimenting with sampling and turntabling within his Roots Rock context, a sonic mash-up that resulted in The Hurting Business, his 2000 masterwork. Likened favorably to other innovators such as Tom Waits, Beck and Joe Henry, Prophet enjoyed a wave of critical success for The Hurting Business, which set the stage for his next pair of albums, the experimental Country/Soul of 2003’s No Other Love and the full-circle splendor of 2005’s Age of Miracles, which found Prophet easily translating nearly every style he’s ever absorbed, from Blues to Soul to Country to Funk to Rock and every combination between and beyond.
As befits a creatively restless soul, Prophet is never simply working on his own material; he is a tireless session musician (Kelly Willis, Jonathan Richman, the late, great Warren Zevon), an incessant side-project dabbler (Go Go Market with his wife Stephanie Finch, Raisins in the Sun with Jules Shear), and a frequent collaborator and producer. The good news is that Prophet is currently at work on a new album, which means it will likely sound like nothing he’s ever done before. Or everything. Or both. (BB)
The Walkmen with The Broken West
Monday · Southgate House
For Hamilton Leithauser, singer/guitarist of the Walkmen, his band exists in two separate worlds.
“The touring mode and the songwriting mode, for us they’re just polar opposites,” he says. “One is just re-creating the song as best you can, just like trying to give it your all and keep it a little entertaining for yourself because night after night it’s just intolerable. Once you do that for two years, like we did, you go back and you try to come up with a new song, you’re so used to playing your instrument in this exact way, that doing something new, it’s just like (having) to shift gears completely.”
Coming into the band’s latest CD, A Hundred Miles Off, The Walkmen might have wanted to check their creative transmission.
“It took us six months to write a single song,” Leithauser says.
Once that first song, “Don’t Get Me Down (Come On Over Here),” came together, the songwriting process started to roll. Had the Walkmen never found the writing touch, it would have been severely disappointing, not only for the band, but for fans who viewed the Walkmen’s arrival in 2002 as something of a saving grace to the unfortunate collapse of one of the best bands to emerge out of the Washington, D.C., area in the mid 1990s.
Three members of The Walkmen — keyboardist Walter Martin, guitarist/keyboardist Paul Maroon and drummer Matt Barrick — were in the highly touted band Jonathan Fire*Eater, which in 1997 landed a seven-figure major label deal with DreamWorks Records only to break up a year later.
“The timing makes it seem like it had something to do with the record label or something like that,” says Leithauser, a friend of Martin’s since childhood. “But it was really just coincidence. It had been coming for a long, long time and the friendships were really falling apart. It just happened when they started doing well they decided they hated each other too much to continue. It was a real shame.”
With a sound that at times evokes early Bob Dylan (“All Hands And The Cook”) and Velvet Underground (“Danny’s At The Wedding”), A Hundred Miles Off is an evocative work. Its many compelling songs get their distinctive character from chiming guitars, the unconventional rhythms of Barrick and Leithauser’s taut vocals.
The band is kicking off 2007 by returning to the touring mode. In addition to play material from A Hundred Miles Off, the band might well include songs from another new project — a track-by-track re-creation of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 CD, Pussycats. That record was actually completed before A Hundred Miles Off was released.
“The whole time of like 2004 and ’05, when we were just touring, that album was just sort of a constant background music for us,” Leithauser says. “Then we finished the last record and decided we wanted to keep recording and we didn’t have any songs written. It seemed like we were really in the perfect place to do that. It was really a fun record, so the whole thing was just a fun project.” (Alan Sculley)
This article appears in Mar 7-13, 2007.
