3 out of 5

Label: Southern Lord

Produced by: Sanford Parker

Continuing the trajectory of Forever Becoming moving away from the more expansive and glittery direction the band had taken after their first few albums, Night Stories dives deeper into chugga-chugga heft, even calling back to the massive weight of the band’s excellent debut EP. But it’s also almost a step too far, lacking in some emotional link between here and there, overcorrecting with sensory assault where before there was nuance. It’s not exactly Pelican’s “Load,” but there’s a similar something at play here, wanting to connect life changes (births, death) with the music but not exactly knowing how to do that. Giving Night Stories a disconnected feeling: a couple of moody acoustics, a al Australasia; some pop-brushed metal, reminiscent of a space between City of Echoes and What We All Come To Need; and then the metal slabs, marrying the merry grind of that first EP with the more dynamic, flexible vibes of Forever.

This is not an unappealing cross section, and the group frankly sounds tighter than ever before, segueing in an out of punkier moments more convincingly than prior attempts, and even getting close to some thrash on track 3. There’re some sequencing considerations, arcing from lighter to heavier fare, penultimating in what is frankly one of the band’s best tracks: Cold Hope, which is a tour de force of bleakness that massages in lithe drumming and melodies in the most sincere expression of emotion across the disc, and definitely even across the back half of their catalogue.

This impact, however, is the rarity. As mentioned, elsewhere the impact feels a bit forced, like the group purposefully adding chuggas onto the ends of their riffs, leading, as a consequence, to a lot of songs drifting in their last passages. At the same time, almost every track has some inspired moment, where are the history and album’s intentions swirl around a congealed bit of rocking out bliss; those moments are hard to sustain, of course.

So Nighttime Stories is an interesting mix: it’s not quite as promising as Forever Becoming in the sense that it doesn’t feel like the step forward that album was, but by the same token, the instinct to go back to basics was smart, and allows for flashes of focus where that initial Pelican spark ignites, but even brighter – inflamed by the lessons of years in the industry.

Expectations forever dog this band, making it hard to really evolve their sound without jerks like mw criticizing them for it. But all of the pieces, between this album and the last, are there for something truly mind blowing in the future.