Grand Canyon or Bust

Any band can make music. Few can make music do something. Illinois rockers Pelican do just that, though, effectively creating Grand Canyons of sound with every meta-suite they attempt. Their songs are filled with the proverbial highs and lows of life itself: consider "Sirius," which inhales and exhales before leaving the head-warped listener with a palpable sense of wonder. Similarly, with its balanced delicacy and ferocity, the colossal "March into the Sea" is by turns both serene and heavy, disorienting and hypnotic, and when the song finally ends—in all its 20:28 epic EP length!—all that's left for you is to ponder the excursion your auditory senses have just triumphantly returned from. And then there's the breathtaking "Aurora Borealis," with the guitars of Messrs. Laurent Lebec and Trevor de Brauw leaving slight striations upon an aural landscape laid out by brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg. Essentially, Pelican is the sound of four individuals collectively constructing a few more triumphant dreams—and a few more red nightmares—free from the constraints of any superfluous label. You can call it whatever your little ambient metal heart desires, but Pelican's mojo is far too vast to be summed up in a few buzzwords. In fact, the protean heaviness is so expansive it practically demands to be experienced live, where the white-hot radiance of Pelican's sound fully materializes into the aforementioned topographical wonders before your eyes and ears. And yes, all in attendance will emerge triumphant because, as Pelican guitar man Lebec proclaims, "We're a fucking triumphant band." No joke.

PELICAN WITH MONO AND TARENTEL AT THE GLASS HOUSE, 200 W. SECOND ST., POMONA, (909) 629-0377; WWW.THEGLASSHOUSE.US. SUN., 7 P.M. $14. ALL AGES.