Pelican
Australasia

[The esteemed DeRecensore wwwhatemoornet informs us that for this review Damaskinos was inspired by a review by the same wwwhatemoornet published on another site.]

For my ears, 2004 couldn't have ended better; in a few days, I've devoured Comets On Fire, Mastodon, Isis, and these fantastic Pelicans. Wide, shrill, dynamic, roaring music...

In an era where we are used to hearing whiny and nostalgic voices, there is someone still cutting to the chase. Well yes, dear friends, Pelican really doesn't use their voice, they let the tools of the trade sing, and beautifully so. After listening to them, it reminds me of The Ballad Of The Ancient Mariner by Coleridge—not for a vein bursting with romantic decay, but because in the Englishman's poem I discovered the nobility of the pelican, which, despite its clumsy appearance, finds the courage to sacrifice itself by tearing strips of flesh from its chest to feed its young in lean times.
I'm talking about an album of sacrifice and openness. If the aim is to channel feelings of suffering, well, having surpassed the double-digit mark of listens, it doesn't seem so to me. I'd rather call it roughness, distorted brutality, naive boldness that, through sweat, evolves into something simply epic. Any textual embellishment would be truly unnecessary at this point.

Australasia contains six songs. One might say that the perfect summary of the album lies in the fourth track, GW, in those three minutes of clean riffing that first transforms into a distortion screaming "stoner stoner" as much as it can, only to be enchanted with a psychedelic spell in the final part. But that would be only an inappropriate schematic. This is an album that cannot be caged.
Indeed, within Australasia many entities coexist: from the post-rock influenced by stoner and postcore of NightendDay to the "almost-metal" of Drought wherein massive rhythms and very in-your-face sounds bring to mind the Opeth of former Blackwater Park. In Untitled, you can even sense a bit of Mogwai. The title track is spectacular, bearing a couple of unforgettable riffs, whether it's running at high speed or slowing down to turn towards atmospheric and relaxed solutions.

We are facing riff-metal wizards, with an instrumental confidence that can only be compared to greats like Isis in creating stoner landscapes of extreme auditory imagination. I, charmed by Kyuss and Black Sabbath, have decided to also bow down to them.