mp3 sample: Pelican
“Strung Up From the Sky”
Pelican has accomplished what many people can only dream of — the band recently had a hamburger named after it.
According to the restaurant Kuma’s Corner in Chicago, the “Pelican Burger” consists of a 10-ounce Kobe beef patty, with pan-seared scallops and lardons, in a garlic white wine sauce on top of a parmesan crisp, and it is served with white wine-garlic aioli.’
Oh, and the band recently came out with a new album, *What We All Come to Need*, which 32-year-old Pelican drummer Jerry Herweg said critics are calling the best in the group’s career.
Pelican will perform its instrumental-rock songs at the Picador, 330 E. Washington St., today alongside Black Cobra and Struck By Lightning. The late show will start at 10 p.m., and admission is $10 in advance.
The band’s latest album takes the energy of the 2007 release, *City of Echoes*, and combines it with the longer, winding progressive-rock influences of earlier albums to make for an epic listening experience.
“I don’t know if it was necessarily a conscious thing, like, ‘Oh, we need to make our songs longer,’ but I think it was the next step in writing,” Herweg said. “We’re always up for trying new things and seeing how they go over.”
Trying new things is a motto the band follows closely. One of the biggest surprises on the mostly instrumental album is the last track “Final Breath,” which features a vocal performance by Allen Epley of the Life and Times.
“We didn’t know what to expect because we put it in his hands, but we were stoked on the outcome,” Herweg said.
Herweg said that the members of Pelican never planned on being a strictly instrumental band when they started out playing in Chicago.
“We’ve always wanted to try to have a song with vocals,” he said. “We don’t have anything against singers, we just never found one.”
The drummer said he has played at the Picador about five or six times now, both with Pelican and his other band, Tusk. He said he doesn’t think anyone actually came to his first show at the Picador, which was then called Gabe’s.
“I’m pretty sure my singer Jodi spiked one of the floor wedges, and we ended up having to pay money to Gabe’s to pay for the gear he broke, rather than get any gas money for the show,” Herweg said.
Luckily, he said, his other experiences at the Picador with Pelican have been successful.
“Ever since [that first show], it has been smooth sailing.”
— by Eric Andersen
