Taking flight with Pelican’s guitar duo
Chicago’s Pelican has been churning out guttural rock instrumentals since 2001. The four-piece is known for its dense combinations of unique melodies, time signatures and jam-band style track lengths. My first exposure to the group was their fine 2007 full-length album City of Echoes – a droning opus fueled by a twin guitar attack. Fresh from a recording session of new material in the Pacific Northwest, WTDP? had the opportunity to chat with the group’s guitarists – Laurent and Trevor – about their gear, their forth-coming EP and plans for the future.
WTDP?: Give us a rundown of each of your current guitar rigs.
TdB: Currently I’ve been running through one of the older two channel Mesa Triple Rectifiers. I guess I bought in back in 1999 or so. It goes through two Emperor cabs – a 4×12 and a 2×12. My guitar is a 1970s Gibson SG. The serial number doesn’t show up in any of the Gibson databases that I’ve seen, which I guess was not uncommon in the 60s and 70s – like the serial numbers sort of jumped around until they came up with a set system for numbering them. The person I bought it from said it’s a ’72.
I go direct from the guitar into an Ernie Ball volume pedal, then a Rat, a Boss DD-6 digital delay, a Boss RV-5 digital reverb, and a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler. I use the distortion channel on my amp for most of our distorted sections, so the Rat is really only there as an extra boost for portions of songs that benefit from super saturation. The delays and reverb are used quite sparsely on my end things, particularly on the songs we’ve been doing the past few years. When we started out I was a bit of a delay junkie, but I’ve totally tempered that addiction. The volume pedal gets the most usage by far. I use it all over pretty much every song to control song dynamics and the amount of gain on my guitar.
LS-L: I use a Mesa 4×12 and occasionally add an Emperor 2×12 that has greenbacks in it. Nice combo with the celestions in my Mesa. Grit, bottom and roundness. My main guitar is a burgundy 1981 Les Paul Custom, which I love. Best feel on a guitar ever and good punch… loaded with Seymour Duncan Jeff Beck combo pickup, as used at one point also by Adam Jones from Tool. Figured he tuned low as hell too so if it worked for him, it’s dope for me. I was also a pedal junkie and have definitely gotten rid of dumb shit recently… no more chorus, no more EQ, no phaser, etc. Just a TS-9 to overdrive my (Marshall) JCM-900 (yep, I love it), two Boss reverbs (one for basic room vibe, subtle, and one for outer space), and two Boss delays with different settings to explore and eventually leave earth on a riff ship. A volume pedal is my main tone shaper and that’s a trick I learned from Trevor. Years of watching him fondle that thing with his foot paid off.
WTDP?: What would you consider your ‘untouchable’ effect… meaning that it will never leave your pedal board and it will likely have to be pried from your cold, dead hands?
TdB: The volume pedal is really the one most indispensable to me.
LS-L: Totally agree.
WTDP?: Is there a pedal, vintage or otherwise, that you’d love to squeeze onto your board?
TdB: I’m really not in an effect-oriented headspace these days. I’m way more focused on riffs and melody lines and not sounds as much as I used to be. If there was anything I would really be into having it would probably be one of the crazier Zvex pedals, like the Seek Wah or something, though it honestly wouldn’t get any use in Pelican since they’re not really suited to what we’re doing. It’d be more just a fun thing to play around with. Those pedals are out of my price range, unfortunately.
LS-L: I used to care about this. I’ve bought Fulltone pedals and other more expensive things and found that I prefer to just write riffs and crank out solid rhythms. I’m a very riff-based guy. It’s what I care about the most, so the balance and relationship of notes within a specific context is what I love, and experimenting with pedals and more abstract/ambient ventures is not my forte.
WTDP?: One thing I love about City of Echoes is the wonderful, throaty overdrive tone that sounds like it is achieved through de-tuning and either natural amp gain or pedal help. How was that achieved?
TdB: You hit the nail on the head. Our guitar tuning is B standard, regular guitar tuning but dropped five half steps. For City of Echoes, we basically used almost every amp at Electrical Audio, the studio it was recorded at. We set up four cabinets in the live room with a variety of different micing configurations, then set up a wall of heads in the control room and swapped back and forth through the heads trying to figure out the best tone for each part. There are several amp changes per song, and we didn’t really take good notes during the process, so it’s hard to say which sound belongs to which amp. I think the majority of tracks were done with the Marshall JCM-800, but Laurent might remember better than I.
LS-L: There is a ton of Marshall tone on that record, and it drove me to play Marshalls afterwards, pretty exclusively. Trevor is rocking an 800 now, too… a super limited issue of it. When you tune that low, you can’t mess with the Marshall coupling. We did not use any SUNN gear on this record and very little Mesa, which is a first for us. It’s definitely the most rock we’ve sounded but the doubling often definitely added to the heaviness overall.
WTDP?: Tell me about the writing process for a Pelican record. Are songs usually created through band jams or are they ‘brought in’ pretty much finished?
TdB: Usually all the riffs are brought in complete but without a solid structure in place. Lately Laurent has done the majority of the writing. The actual song arrangements are done in groupings of members from two to four. For instance it might just be me and Laurent working on blending riffs into each other, or Laurent and Larry, or the three string players, or the whole group. In general it seems to work best when we meet up in smaller groups and then build up the layers of the song one person at a time. Revisions happen pretty frequently up until we record.
LS-L: I second that. The shit is always changing. The group dynamic is strong now… very strong. So even though I bring a lot of the beginning riffs, we definitely structure together.
WTDP?: What are Pelican’s plans for 2009? New record? Tour?
TdB: We were just up in Seattle recording a new EP for our new label Southern Lord. It’s a three song recording, consisting of two new compositions and our first ever cover song. It should come out in late Spring, right around when we’ll be heading in to the studio to record a new album.
LS-L: We’re also doing the ISIS tour in May/June, before a break, and then we record the full length, and then take a real break before we do select shows to promote the new bomber. All in all, we’re busy and feeling creative and re-charged these days. Good vibes and posi-mental attitude.
WTDP?: What’s the skinny on the new full-length effort?
TdB: We’ll be working with Chris Common – he’s the one that just did our EP. We haven’t figured out exactly where it’s going to be done, but it will definitely be with him as he brought a lot of life to the songs we just did.
Pelican’s new EP ‘Ephemeral’ is slated for release on June 6th through Southern Lord. The label is handling the vinyl and mp3 side of the release, while the CD version will be self-released by Trevor’s own Migration Media label. The band hopes to have advanced copies of the three-track disc available for sale during the ISIS tour it is set to join in May.
