3 out of 5

Label: Southern Lord

Produced by: Sanford Parker

With several years now of working with guitarist Dallas Thomas, Pelican launch a single and a B-side from their forthcoming followup to Forever Becoming, Nighttime Stories.

It’s hard not to analyze this music strictly as part of the journey to get here: the artwork is reflective of the red-tinged cover of What We All Come to Need, but both songs here namecheck the night in some way, and if the title track is the answer to that album’s non-question…

Forever Becoming was, to my ears, a mixed bag of freshly-injected POV and attempts to call back to the sounds of yore; both a redirect from Need’s faceless mishmash, and allowing for the inspiration of Thomas’ addition. I dug the album, but was even more excited by what the group could evolve toward.

The two songs here do answer that, to a degree: both Midnight and Mescaline and Darkness On The Stairs surge between punkier riffing and some classic Pelican sludge, albeit done with a slightly more deft hand than in the past. The setup is incredibly fluid, and the tracks have purpose, without the occasionally forced feeling of “depth” that was always there while the group was trying to duck from mathrock and hardcore genre tags.

At the same time, though… there’s no Wow factor. I kept wondering if I just have excessive nostalgia for classic PLCN, and / or was not giving these songs enough time, but there’s just an unfortunate been there and done that vibe to things; a familiarity that the band have perhaps gifted to the scene in many ways – plenty of groups would likely cite them as an influence at this point. However, there’s also a relative ebb and flow to these tracks that maybe speaks to a different approach in general: the songs kind of hit their strides right away, and allow for those punky and sludgey successes to flash by kind of quickly, with no reveling. It makes me wonder if this won’t play really well in an extended format, backend by a lot of other songs to enhance the vibe – say, on an album.

So while neither track here is maybe a single that necessitates tracking this down to listen to on its own, the Dallas Thomas iteration of the group does seem to have found its way to a more particular sound that still leaves me hopeful – eager – for hearing it in a full length context. These two tracks without that context are totally solid rockers, just not all that impactful.