Instrumental metal quartet Pelican are celebrating ten years as a band, but they’re not eager to characterize their longevity as an impressive feat. Their story wouldn’t make a particularly salacious episode of Behind the Music—no suicidal debauchery, no backstabbing, no fistfights. “Ultimately we’re incredibly boring in the reality-show-drama aspect,” says guitarist Laurent Lebec. “I never took anyone in this band to the hospital. No one’s had to have their stomach pumped. We almost got arrested once, but the drugs were ingested before they were found.”
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But most bands don’t disintegrate in fireballs of moronic excess—they break up for an infinite variety of reasons, from the pressures of worldwide popularity to the pressures of mortgages and child-rearing. It’s hard to keep any band together for a decade, even a drama-free one, and in light of that it doesn’t seem silly for Pelican to pat themselves on the back. They’re playing two tenth-anniversary shows, one this Saturday, October 23, at Bottom Lounge and one next Saturday, October 30, in LA—where brothers Larry and Bryan Herweg, the band’s drummer and bassist, now live. German label Viva Hate is releasing a wooden box containing Pelican’s seven major releases on ten LPs and a T-shirt. And the folks at Three Floyds—regulars at Big Star, where Lebec manages and tends bar—are brewing a commemorative doppelbock called the Creeper, named after a song on Pelican’s 2009 album What We All Come to Need. (Lebec and guitarist Trevor de Brauw are beer nerds, and Lebec hosts monthly beer tastings at Bucktown wine shop Red & White—the next one’s on Wednesday, October 27.) The brewery plans to bottle the Creeper, but it’ll be available first on tap, both at the Bottom Lounge show and at a party at Big Star on Sunday, October 24, at 7 PM.
Heavy touring puts a strain on more than just a band’s finances. “You’re divorcing yourself from a complete normal life, and all of us have serious girlfriends and wives,” says de Brauw. Lebec and his wife, Sarah Schroeder, are expecting their first child in December. “You’re sacrificing your friendships, you’re sacrificing your relationships with people back home. You’re sacrificing your home. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back from tour and my roommates and my girlfriend would have completely rearranged the place, and you walk in and you don’t recognize the environment you live in. Your cats don’t recognize you.”
When Pelican started, the band “was just a pursuit of sound,” says Lebec, “and it felt very private. We never knew where we were going. But I think we got to this point around [the 2005 album The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw] where it seemed like it could have catapulted to the next level—but ultimately, and this is just me saying it, that move to go to the next level needed something that we never compromised on, and that’s a vocalist.” Well, almost never: Allen Epley of the Life and Times sings on “Final Breath,” which closes What We All Come to Need. But the band made a point of not playing that up. “We did it when we wanted to do it, which was at the tail end of that largest bubble of popularity,” says Lebec. “We did it the way it should have been done: we did it for our art and as a middle finger to the people who wanted to have it happen three years before.”
