Russian Circles

with Pelican

About this show

Halfway through the four-year touring cycle for their eighth full-length record Gnosis , Chicago-based instrumental trio Russian Circles hit the two-decade anniversary of their formation. One might expect a band to capitalize on such a major milestone. Instead, guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz, and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook spent 2024 unceremoniously touring in support of their most recent album across Australia, South America, Europe, and North America. After all, this is the work ethic that built Russian Circles into one of the biggest heavy instrumental rock bands in the world. This is a band with no hit songs. No fan consensus on their best album. Just a reputation for consistency and quality.  Not that things haven’t changed in the last 22 years. The band is now spread out between Chicago, Los Angeles, and a rural island off the coast of Seattle. While the trio insists their music is a confluence of broad-ranging influences—the formidable Touch & Go artists of the Midwest, the prog giants of late ‘60s and early ‘70s England, the hypnotic motorik and kosmische grooves of West Germany, the international underground’s most caustic strains of metal—it is fair to say Russian Circles’ adventurous diversity has evolved into its own distinct sound. As one of the notoriously press-shy members anonymously mentioned, “the music we make is a collective process of reconciliation, navigation, and reflection upon aging both as individuals and as a creative entity. Life has created very real distances between us, but the band continues to be at the center, and this creative collaboration is a way of charting the passage of time while also giving us a reason to look to the future.” On their latest album, Nine , the band triangulates their relative positions into singular seismic long-form album-oriented soundtracks to the trials and tragedies of life in the modern age. For Nine , Russian Circles adhered to their strategy from Blood Year (2019) and Gnosis (2022) by teaming up with engineer Kurt Ballou (Converge, Mastodon, High on Fire). Basic tracking took place at Electrical Audio in Chicago while the finishing touches occurred at Ballou’s GodCity Studio in Salem, Massachusetts. Recording at Electrical Audio allowed the band to retain a thread to their earliest endeavors, with the band having recorded at Steve Albini’s exalted studio as far back as their debut album Enter (2006). The relationship with Ballou is a more recent development stemming back to the band’s sixth album Guidance (2016), owing to his ability to highlight the weight and entropy of metal and hardcore bands in their natural environment while enhancing the clarity and articulation often lost in walls of distortion.  Nine continues Russian Circles’ unhurried evolution and disciplined refinement, leaning into their strengths while pushing at the boundaries of their sound. Album opener “Borehole” offers what might be the band’s closest approximation of a traditional rock song schematic, with a structure of repeating parts that takes the listener on a journey promising hope only to bring them full circle to the dark, desolate, and dystopian futility of the song’s namesake: Russia’s abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole. From there, the band launches into a ferociously concise overview of metal battle tactics with “Empath”—where a Godflesh-style bass crunch and tornado siren drone ushers in thrash-inspired guitars, venomous black metal attacks, d-beat forays, a deliciously knuckleheaded hardcore breakdown, and a final scorched earth war metal riff, all in just under five minutes. Side A closes with Nine ’s grand centerpiece—the patiently cataclysmic “Eluvial.” Centered around the kind of ping-ponging delayed guitar patterns that Brian Eno and The Edge developed for The Joshua Tree , guitarist Mike Sullivan slowly unfurls a winding, linear melody against the backdrop of drummer Dave Turncrantz’s Latin-rhythm-inspired groove and Brian Cook’s pairing...