PELICAN "Recording 'City of Echoes' for almost two weeks in a high end studio then fly to New York to mix? On paper it sounded unbelieveably rock star-ish; our final transition from basement rockers to full fledged seasoned professionals." "City of Echoes", the third full length from windy city dwellers Pelican, is sure to alienate existing fans -not that the boys care. Keeping in the tradition with the bands intention to constantly morph and mature while retaining the original element of sweeping and textural instrumental metal, they have created a masterwork that spawns genres and features guitarists Lebec and De Brauw dueling at the height of their powers. Leading the pack comes naturally to the quintet who continues to release thunderous and passionate tunes that, without saying a word, speak to everyone. Pelican are about to embark on a European tour in support of "City of Echoes" [released on Hydrahead]. This Roadburn-sponsored tour with High on Fire will start November 14th, at Vera in Groningen, Holland. For tour dates, please click here. Words | Trevor de Brauw So this studio report is being turned in way, way past the due date. At this point it is no longer a report on fresh memories, but a process of digging back a ways to try and remember the finer details of how our album came to be. Best to start from the beginning. We knew that with this excursion we wanted to break away from our formula of working with friends of the band. Although we've been happy with the results of our prior recorded output, we definitely felt like having an outsider's ear would bring a fresh perspective to the sound and our working method. After deliberation and emphatic heartfelt recommendations from our friends in Cave In and Daughters, we decided to give Andrew Schneider a swing at it. Keelhaul's 'Subject to Change Without Notice' is one of my personal favorite heavy-record productions and what he was able to squeeze out of Cave In's 'Perfect Pitch Black' in only three days of studio time is stunning. Having settled on an engineer we started leaning on Hydrahead for a budget. We figured the best way to do it would be to record in Electrical Audio for another go-round [EA is the studio built and owned by Steve Albini, where we recorded our 'The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw' LP and 'March Into the Sea' EP], and fly Andrew out from his home in Brooklyn. We got Hydrahead to agree to 10 days of tracking and four days of mixing- five more days than we had for the last record, if I remember correctly. Andrew was more than happy to try out the space and legendary mic selection at EA, but insisted that we do the mixing at his studio Translator in Brooklyn. Recording for almost two weeks in a high end studio then fly to New York to mix? On paper it sounded unbelieveably rock star-ish; our final transition from basement rockers to full fledged seasoned professionals. Hydrahead agreed and we booked the dates. Larry and Bryan flew out from LA a couple of days early to rehearse. We'd done demos with our friend Sanford Parker at the new Volume Studios [the story of our demo-ing is a shortcut to Hell that could take up several pages of writing itself - long story short, NEVER book studio time first thing in the morning the day you get back from a four week tour of Canada] and the songs had still felt pretty rough around the edges. We'd practiced endlessly on our own at home, but were still not 100% confident. Luckily all the listening to demos and focusing on the faults and practicing had paid off because we sounded way better, less uptight, and more confident than we had on the demos. Andrew came to town one day early to listen to us practice since he'd never seen us live. He too, commented that it sounded better than the demos, but also took some notes on what he felt we needed to work on. We had never recorded with an outsider before. One of upsides of this that we were looking for was that we wanted someone who would not settle. A friend is likely to say "that guitar sound is good enough" or, my least favorite, "it'll get lost in the mix" [about making errors]. We wanted an outsider who wouldn't have an emotional investment in telling us when things weren't gonna work. And Andrew stepped up and earned his nickname 'The Coach.' The record was tracked with a combination of ProTools and 2" tape. We started with the drums - basically did four days of several takes of the songs. We would record take after take onto tape until we had a few that felt right, then Andrew would dump the good takes to ProTools and we would sort out which one we wanted to use. Andrew was very set on making sure that the different songs all had individual character rather than one sound through the whole album. The drum room at Electrical is a huge two story room with brick walls that lends a huge booming sound to the drums. We used it for five of the songs, then Schneider insisted that we do two of the songs in the dead room, a carpeted closet with no natural reverberation. It was totally counterintuitive to the method we'd used on all our recordings, but it ended up working great. The two songs were 'Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed' and 'Lost in the Headlights', two of the busiest songs on the record. Aside from giving the record a more varied feel, it also meant that all the busy guitar work was not lost in the noise that accompanies a large room sound drum recording. After the drum tracking Bryan belted out his bass lines pretty quick. All the bass and guitar parts were recorded with the cabinets downstairs in the recording room while the amp head and guitarist were upstairs playing along in the control room. This made communication very quick between us and Andrew and guaranteed that we would hear the sound of the instrument as it would be on the record rather than a muddy mix in the headphones. I think Bryan worked for two days, then Laurent and I split the last four days tag teaming our way through the songs. Electrical has a pretty brutal selection of amps, so what we ended up doing was setting up four cabs in the drum room, close mic'd them all with a couple of different mics, set up a room mic in the event that room reverb sounded good on a part, then lugged about a dozen different heads up to the control room and made a huge wall of them. This way we could use the patch bay in the control room down to the cabs downstairs really quickly and switch from head to head trying to find the sound we were looking for. I wish I had kept a journal on the process because I know that we used at least ten different heads on the album, but I don't remember exactly what guitar amp is which sound. I think Laurent might have not even used his own Sunn Model T, which so many people think is a big part of our sound. Marshalls and Ampegs had a much bigger role in this record. I remember Laurent was the first up to deck. I think we collaborated for about two hours getting a guitar sound down that really brought out all the notes and the picking and brought the heavy [the holy trinity of sorts]. It might have been 'Lost in the Headlights' actually. I went and watched TV while he did a few takes. After an hour or so he called me in to listen to the results. It sounded awesome. Except for thirty seconds in the middle where the guitar sound we had labored over so intensely completely buried the melody in what he was playing. So we ended up plugging and unplugging a few things and found a different guitar sound for that part. Basically, tracking the first song set the method that we did the rest of the record with. It was a long process of going through each song part by part figuring out what guitar sound seemed to suit it. In some cases we had to go riff by riff to build a song that sounded the way we wanted. Again it was counterintuitive to how we had ever worked before, but the results make us totally happy, so it was worth the effort. I don't remember the actual recording dates, but it was basically right before Christmas. I think we wrapped up on the 22nd or 23rd and Andrew flew out to see his family and we all gave our ears a rest for a few weeks. We reconvened in Brooklyn in early January. New York City is the most expensive city in the US, so we decided to keep it on the cheap by staying at Andrew's studio. This is where the whole rock star mythos really broke down. His studio had one dirty couch in the control room [which Lex from Daughters had slept on nude, apparently], one futon in a room with poor heat, and floor space. No showers. Mixing is a very boring process, most of what I remember was sitting around, waiting for Andrew to come up with something he liked and then us commenting on it. We wandered around the neighborhood a little looking for food, ate many bagels and drank much coffee. A few days later we had a record. We had plans to hang out with Adam from Vice and Justin from Austerity Program and their free time happened to correspond with when we finished the record. We ended up sitting around in the dark listening to the record from start to finish. It was good to have some fresh ears present - after two weeks of listening to songs continuously you really begin to lose perspective on what they sound like. Adam and Justin are both dudes who have always been completely on the level with us, so their approval definitely meant we were in a good place. That's about it. In March we started touring the record, which was released on June 6th. It seems like we have been touring continuously ever since. I'm proud to say, however, that this is gonna be our last tour this year. Then we'll start planning 2008. Pelican - "City of Echoes"