Photo by Matt Darcy

One of the bigger frustrations in regards to there being way too much music and not enough time to cover it all over the past year was the inability to get around to praising how goddamn fucking good Flickering Resonance, the impressive return to form from post-metal gods Pelican, is. The Chicago four-piece had already built an impressive monument of heaviness at this stage before this point, but their first album in six years sparks a reverberating impression of them anew as they continue carving their way through this human experience in a driving collision of instrumental doom metal, post-rock, and post-hardcore.

Ascending, a new 12″ EP slated for release next year, course corrects that failure while giving reason to wake anyone up who slept on it to begin with in a louder rumble. “Cascading Crescent”, a central track on the album, breaks away from Pelican’s wordless anthems in its Ascending state. In featuring Thursday, No Devotion and United Nations’ frontman Geoff Rickly, the listen gets politically firebombed through spoken word narrations, serrated screams, and Rickly’s harrowing singing that in a sense are like the vocal representations of Pelican’s faceted style, its meaning more embossed more directly. “Even the stars in the sky are screaming / ‘Don’t shoot’.” If you weren’t listening then, they have your attention now.

Pelican’s Ascending will be released January 23rd on Run for Cover Records.