Growing up in Florida, you learn that a hurricane entails more than raging gusts and torrential rain. Major storms play out in a symphonic process, dramatically unfolding as they crawl scouring across the landscape: There’s the long, twilit buildup, ominous and uncanny in its stillness, there are minor movements that percolate with pelting rain or crash with falling tree limbs, there are crescendos of eerily howling winds and booming thunder, there’s the famous calm in the eye of the hurricane, there’s the renewed peace at the end. The aural dynamics of a big storm are fearful and awesome and quite entertaining—provided it hasn’t blown the roof off your house.

Pelican almost succeeded in that hurricane-like level of drama, rattling Neumo’s walls but ultimately leaving the place intact. The Chicago quartet are freakin’ loud—metal loud, thunder loud—but there’s the melody of shifting breezes and the delicacy of falling rain beneath their guitar-driven squalls. Purely instrumental, they’re out for epicness, for pure musical grandeur undiluted by words. Without vocals it’s easy for listeners to slip in or out of their music—a fact that allowed quick access into their monumental compositions, but also made it easy to lapse out of them, too. Pelican demand attentive listening for maximum effect.

And when you give it, the rewards are great. Among the crowd, there was less headbanging and more fully entranced, knee-bent swaying—if you’ve ever seen orthodox Jews in prayer, bowing their entire bodies in unison, the motion was about the same. At its best, the music was that encompassing.

Between song banter grounded the set on terra firma, but otherwise the music roared into the cosmos or crushed into the molten center of the earth. Hard to recognize songs without lyrics, though they played at least a few from their 2005 masterpiece The Fire in our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw. They’ve got a brand-new album out, too, but I have yet to hear it.

Only an hour long, the set was too short, just like the last time I saw Pelican. Music this deliberate, glacial, tempestuous—it takes time to develop, and once the storm comes you just want to be drenched to the core. Pelican shut off the tap too soon.