It could be argued that the headliners wouldn’t exist without the wide-ranging musical innovations of the support act. But then, it could equally be argued that although Pelican are billed as the headliners, this is effectively a double header. And what a double header.
JK Flesh – the latest in an innumerable succession of monikers of the staggeringly prolific Justin Broadrick of Godflesh legend – isn’t in the post-rock / post-metal place he was when working under the Jesu banner, though. Instead, he’s reworking the material from the ‘Posthuman’ album in a live setting, with a minimal amount of kit, namely a laptop and an 8-string guitar. Yet this one man, who plays in his own private space in near darkness and submerged in smoke, with his hood pulled down over his eyes, makes a devastating amount of noise. The vocals were a mangled snarl of distortion and buried in the mix, which was dominated by crushing dubstep beats. We never get a proper look at him, and he doesn’t utter a word, instead immersing himself completely in the immense, dense wall of sound. He leaves us deafened, devastated and destroyed.
Pelican may have a conventional rock / metal lineup consisting of bass, drums and two guitars, but their output is anything but conventional, melding the trappings of instrumental post-rock and metal to forge immense wide-scale sonic vistas. There are two things that separate Pelican from both their post-rock and post-metal peers: they have infinitely more punch than the former, and are all about the riff rather than the crescendo, and moreover, their songs are tightly structured and avoid the common tendency to meander for a year and a day. Consequently, their music is both cerebral and physical. It’s nigh on impossible to fault the execution, either, and while there are moments of delicate beauty to ponder to an cleanse the soul, they pave the way for crunching, heavyweight riffage.
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Trevor de Brauw and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec are both lively in their performance, and both guitarists are completely immersed in the music, leaping and lunging wildly as they crank out the chords.
The set-list focuses on their more recent career, going back to ‘Dead Between the Walls’ and ‘Lost in the Headlights’ from 2007’s ‘City of Echoes’, with ‘Ephemeral’ and ‘Strung Up from the Sky’ representing ‘What We All Come to Need’ and lifting ‘Parasite Colony’ from last year’s ‘Ataraxia/Taraxis’ EP. They also provide some tantalising tasters of the upcoming ‘Forever Becoming,’ which promises to be a belter. One doesn’t pick high points from a Pelican set, though: consistency is the key and by the time they left the stage, there was no question that they’re not only consistent, but utterly exhilarating.
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