(Southern Lord) 
What We All Come to Need is Pelican‘s first full length release on Southern Lord and and continues their elusive path of powerful instrumental rock. Southern Lord have also announced a tour with stable mates Wolves in the Throne Room, which has the makings of some must see gigs. Two fantastic but very different bands.
What We All Come to Need is a superb album. At turns effortless and drifting then dirty and heavy. Pelican take their post rock post metal sound into darker directions with more emphasis on riff. Ok, post metal, and post rock for that matter, are troubling genres. Or maybe they are just troubled. It’s hard to pin
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Are Tortoise feeling their age? Beacons of Ancestorship, their sixth album and first album proper in five years, is littered with references to age. Ancestorship is a reasonable pointer, with Tortoise being the ancestors of course. And the title “Prepare Your Coffin” is pretty explicit. Not that Tortoise are letting it show musically. Beacons of Ancestorship kicks out into a noisy fuzz-fest at points. It was introduced to me as being synth heavy, which is right on the money. Tortoise have augmented their sound with a fat bank of analogue synths and begun to explore the territories of electronica. The result is an odd eclectic album, at points noisy and reassuringly angular, then at others well … er
Ellen Mary McGee, founder of folk-rock band Saint Joan, has created a short but magnificently intense début album with The Crescent Sun. Its a dark lyrical collection of folk songs written, sung, and largely performed by McGee. She plays guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, drums, percussion and drafts in the help of other musicians ranging from organists to electric guitarists, which takes folk music into fascinating territories. At the same time The Crescent Sun sounds very traditional and very progressive.
Black Cascade, the third album from Wolves In The Throne Room, is truly epic stuff, clocking in at four superb monolithic compositions. For me it ticks all the black metal boxes: big guitar riffs, big keyboard parts, triplets galore, and tempos that run from the majestically slow to death blasts and back again. Black Cascade is symphonic, but not as furious as, say, Emperor. Nor do Wolves In The Throne Room vanish into some kind of nasty neo-pagan Tolkeinesque kitsch favoured but some modern black metal bands.
Nadja Bardens, London 22 March 2009
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For The Time Being is a double CD compilation of ambience, taken from material originally released between 2004 and 2007 by A Slow Rip on 7 CDR albums. The Wollongong based trio take the name from the initials of their first names: Rob Laurie (guitar, percussion, vocals and wind instruments), Ian Miles (analogue synths, guitar and bass), and Phil Turnbull (virtual analogue synth). A pretty impressive list of instruments. A Slow Rip are definitely not laptop artists, which is fine by me; personally, I’ve always thought they were more suited for spreadsheets than music.