Metascore
79

Generally favorable reviews - based on 10 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 10
  2. Negative: 0 out of 10
  1. This is still insanely large-sounding music, and is heavy in the extreme, but its new tenets give listeners more to hold on--and perhaps dream on--than simply low-tuned, ponderous riffing.
  2. What we’ve all come to need is balance and perspective before death, and Pelican provides that with perfect precision.
  3. Alternative Press
    80
    What We All Come To Need finds Pelican mastering their post-metal craft while indulging the ambitious curiousities that hinted at on 2007's "City Of Echoes."
  4. Having established the hypnotic power of loud, dense guitar marches long ago, Pelican sound free enough at last to explore melodic intricacy and inventive theme-and-variation play without hewing to the old layer of protective gloom.
  5. Uncut
    80
    Pelican don't look like metal kids - however, their ruminative riffology and ability to raise apocalyptic visions mark them out as practitioners of a new, reflective metallurgy alongside the likes of Sun0)))'s Stephen O' Malley. [Jan 2010, p. 123]
  6. What We All Come to Need is a largely successful display of Pelican’s well-defined sound with the invigoration of guest star peers and promising glimmers of growth.
  7. Though there’s nothing startlingly new here, this is a consistently engaging record that doesn’t so much successfully straddle metal and post-rock than have both coursing through its veins.
  8. The guitars are huge. The drumming is fine. But the disc falls a few inches shy of the group’s tantalizingly elusive potential.

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