Thrill Jockey complete their Pelican reissue campaign with a remix and remaster of the doom metal band’s acclaimed 2005 LP The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw. Remembered as the Chicago outfit’s breakthrough album and a record that shaped the future of heavy music (and post-rock), the LP’s remix was overseen by original engineer Greg Norman.
“Toward the beginning of the pandemic, Hydra Head announced that they were going to cease operations as a label and were going to release masters back to the bands,” says Pelican’s Trevor Shelley de Brauw, speaking from his home in Chicago via Zoom. “One of our early conversations was with Thrill Jockey, and we decided to license the albums to them,” he recalls. “I think we all knew that we wanted to remaster the albums and dig through the archive and find what we could.”
He and the other members found an archive that could have gone deeper. Some things were languishing on tapes in Shelley de Brauw’s basement; others were more difficult to come by. What everyone knew was that they wanted to digitize the 24-track tapes. Shelley de Brauw brought the recordings to Norman, along with two track mixes and other materials: “All of the stuff that we have on analog, just making sure that we have a digital back-up of everything.”
As the process moved forward, a series of memories came to the fore, including the sense that Pelican had maybe fallen short of their intentions for the LP some years earlier. Norman had nearly two more decades of experience behind him, and the band had more knowledge of making records. Norman proposed a remix, and Pelican took the bait, offering him “Sirius”, one of The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw‘s shorter numbers but one that also spoke to the heavy/pretty dynamic of Pelican’s music. “He took a pass at it,” recalls Shelley de Brauw, “we listened to it and said, ‘Oh my god! This is the way that we wanted to sound all along.”
Guitars shimmer more brightly on the new mix, and the rhythm section of bassist Bryan Herweg and drummer Larry Herweg kicks with a new intensity that further reveals the sheer austerity of the compositions.
“For a long time, I was not super stoked [on the album] because it felt like our ideas had outpaced our playing abilities,” says Shelley de Brauw. “The way I remembered the record after we made subsequent albums was that it was really flawed. When we revisited it for the reissue, I found myself very surprised by how much better all my playing was on it than I had thought. Just how ambitious the songwriting was for how young we were. I feel accomplished in those realms now as a writer and player. But when I think back to my playing as a young man, I certainly don’t feel that same level of confidence, so to go back and hear that stuff and realize, ‘Oh, we were kind of on to something!’ was revelatory.”
Bryan Herweg’s bass carries a depth not always present on the initial release. “Bryan spent a very long time dialing in a distinct bass sound,” says Shelley de Brauw. “It was gritty and biting, but recording it like that meant that he lost some low end. It was hard to capture the way that it was supposed to sound in the initial mix, but Greg was able to figure out how to bring that presence back and bring that low end back into it, and once we heard that and balanced that with the drums it was, like, ‘God, this is so much better than it was!'”
In the following interview, Shelley de Brauw recalls much of the making of an album that would change the trajectory of his band and life.
What went into the writing of The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw?
The period when we were writing The Fire in Our Throats coincided with Laurent [Schroeder-Lebec] and I moving in together. We had been living in separate apartments during the Australasia era, and I moved into a very large three-bedroom apartment with my wife in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Laurent ended up moving into one of the bedrooms there—I think it coincided with when his lease was up. We ended up jamming on acoustic guitars almost every night. That gave the songs a lot of space to breathe and grow over time.
One of the things that really differentiated from what would come after it was that this was a period where we were playing locally a lot, but we weren’t doing a whole lot of touring. The tunes were written as compositions in their own right, and there really wasn’t any forethought in terms of live presentation. We were making these dense, interlayered compositions. There was really something about the way that they would breathe and grow night-by-night writing on acoustic guitars.
How long would it take for a song to go from that acoustic format to where you were working it out with the full band?
Probably not that long. The period between Australasia and Fire in Our Throats wasn’t that long. It was about two years, start-to-finish writing it. I can’t imagine it was that long between writing it at home and bringing it to the practice space because we also practiced every week. They would come together relatively quickly.
But I don’t want to say that the songs were written only on acoustic guitars. There was a lot of jamming in the practice space and things that we would start to develop there that would come out of just playing together. We were coming at it from a lot of different angles. It was just a really creative time for us. We were always together.
What would happen when the other guys would engage with the ideas you’d been working on with acoustic guitars?
There was just a free flow of ideas. We’ve always been open [to that]. Everyone has equal democratic input. More so on that record than anything before. Before, I think many songs came from Laurent, and we would flesh them out together in the practice space. But Fire in Our Throats coincided with a period where everything became extremely democratic, where ideas were coming from each and every person. Even when Laurent and I would bring in something to the practice space, we would continue to flesh it out and develop it.
Larry would come up with a special drum part, and then we would let [a] part morph to fit that, or Bryan would come up with a cool bass concept, and we would continue to build on all the various pieces from each person.
You mentioned local gigging earlier. Were the songs finding their way into the sets, and were you using the audience’s reaction as a barometer?
No, because the writing wasn’t about the live presentation; it was always very self-indulgent. We were always following our own whims and whatever made us feel good, and [we were] not really concerned about an audience whatsoever. We were definitely starting to play these songs out early. The song “March to the Sea” was called that because it was the new song we played when we did the West Coast tour for Australasia. That was already a fixture in our set. I think our friend Ryan might have suggested the name. So we called it the March to the Sea tour. And then we said, “OK, well, that would be a good name for this song!” [laughs]
That was when you could get into a van and go out for three weeks without too much trouble. The economics were different.
I believe that tour was eight days long. I think we drove to Los Angeles and drove home. So, in theory? Yeah. But we weren’t making any money, and we weren’t trying to make any money off of the band. It was really a creative exercise for all of us. We all had day jobs and stuff like that, kind of as we are now. There were a couple of years and album cycles after Fire in Our Throats where we were trying to make it as a living. But [in that early period] there was no thought of any success or trying to make it a career, during the writing process anyway.
How long did the tracking take, and what methods did you use to track the album?
The thing I remember most about that is that Australasia was recorded for $3000, which we thought was an incredible sum of money at the time. We came up with a plan for recording Fire in Our Throats that would involve eight days at Electrical Audio: Four days for tracking and three days for mixing. When we tallied up the costs, it was in the neighborhood of $10,000, which we thought was absolutely an insane amount of money. I was terrified to call the label and ask for that.
I had to build up my confidence, “Oh my god, what am I going to say? How am I going to put this to them?” I remember calling Mark Thompson [Hydra Head Records] and saying, “Listen, we’ve got this game plan. You need to hear me out. We need $10,000.” He said, “Yeah, sure, no problem.” Apparently, the success of Australasia had been solid enough that they were feeling safe about making that investment.
We would have started with the bass and the drums and then layered the guitars on top of that and then some overdubs on the fourth day and three days of mixing. It’s actually ironic that I’m wearing a Mono shirt right now because we were in Studio A and Mono were in Studio B making You Are There at the same time.
Oh wow.
We were already buds with those guys, so I remember when we finished the mix for “Sirius”, we called them over and had them take a listen to it. [laughs] I remember the end of the song finishing and Taka [Goto] going, “Oh wow!”
Has that friendship continued to this day?
Laurent and I just popped by their recording session a few weeks ago. They were in town recording at Electrical again. Maybe that’s secret! Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that!
When you got ready to put the record out, did you have some sense that you had something special?
We didn’t have the impression that it was going to be as big as it was. But it felt very special to us. We felt like it was a huge accomplishment in terms of our ambitions and aims musically. We would have never anticipated being in the New York Times or playing a sold-out show at Knitting Factory in New York. All this stuff that happened in the wake of the record coming out was completely outside our ambitions. We just wrote the songs that we were hearing in our heads.
Does it become hard to keep perspective in moments like that?
It led to some growing pains, I think. I think all of us from that period forward had a different sense of where it could go. All of us come from somewhat of a punk background, and for me, it felt like the growth happened bigger and quicker than I was able to process it, which made some of the decisions that we made after that hard to take, like doing package tours like Taste of Chaos. That ultimately put us in front of even bigger audiences. But in retrospect, I feel like my views were flawed because I’ve seen the legacy-building effect that those moves had over time.
Certainly, in the moment, it was confusing and challenging in its own ways.
I suspect you’ve seen your share of bands you’ve influenced, especially after this album. Did you have some sense of that?
I haven’t really noticed it too much with us. If people are trying to copy what we’re doing, maybe they’re doing it in a creative enough way that it doesn’t sound like us to me. The band that there were a lot of copycats of at the time was Isis. Man, it seemed like any show we played, there’d be at least one band that sounded just like Isis, and the house sound guy would always play Isis between the bands. That band was fucking ubiquitous! Holy shit!