Pelican guitarist Laurent Lebec knows there’s a disconnect between the way he looks and the music he plays. “We’ve rolled up to festivals and people will be waiting there for us like, ‘We heard you didn’t look like metalheads. We heard you guys look like total emo nerds.’”
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The two guitarists met in 1995, when de Brauw was a high school senior in Evanston and Lebec had just arrived from Paris to attend Northwestern. “We knew all the same punks,” says de Brauw, “and did a lot of the same social activism–Food Not Bombs and other things like that.” After playing together in a series of short-lived hardcore bands they formed Tusk in 1997 with singer Simon Czerwinskyj and future Pelican drummer Larry Herweg. Lebec switched to bass, and de Brauw wrote most of the music. But even before Tusk put out their first seven-inch in 2001, Lebec was feeling dissatisfied with the band’s division of labor and started working on a batch of instrumental songs.
“After a few years of not having an outlet for writing guitar riffs, I tried doing some stuff, but it didn’t fit the model for Tusk,” says Lebec. He and Herweg, roommates at the time, started working up the new material, bringing in de Brauw as second guitarist. “It’s funny–we decided to do a new band, but we basically did it with the same exact people,” says Lebec. They recruited Herweg’s younger brother, Bryan, to play bass, and the band that would become Pelican spent the next ten months developing its sound.
Staggering volume is a defining feature of the Pelican live show, though there’s more breathing room in the set than there used to be. “When we first started the band and the melodies were really simple, the physical feeling of the music was an integral aspect to what we were trying to do,” says Lebec. “But over the course of the two albums the songwriting has shifted in a way that the emphasis is now on clarity. And with super super high volumes there’s no chance for that kind of clarity.” (“I think my amp is at half what it was when we started,” adds de Brauw.) But even dialed down, Pelican’s stage volume tops 120 decibels, and for the crowd out in front of the PA stacks the sound is as punishing as ever. “People always come up to me and say, ‘Yeah man, it was so much more awesome with the earplugs out,’” says de Brauw. “And I’m like, ‘Well, we wrote the songs with earplugs in, so I’m pretty sure that’s how they’re supposed to be heard.’”
