Album Review: Pelican, Flickering Resonance
Posted in Reviews on May 26th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Whatever else its eight component songs might be ‘about’ in terms of subject matter, Pelican‘s Flickering Resonance is about love. The long-running Chicago instrumentalists’ first album in six years since 2019’s Nighttime Stories (review here) is something of a reset, or return-to-form, and as they feature returned guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who came back to the band three years ago and was in Tusk with drummer Larry Herweg and guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw before Pelican were even founded, let alone being a founding member — the band is completed by bassist Bryan Herweg, who joined in 2001 — some of the material here represents the most straightforward Pelican have sounded in two decades.
The record breaks in half with a shorter piece introducing each side in “Gulch” on side A and “Cascading Crescent” leading the way into side B, but each side is also arranged from shortest to longest, so the tracks feel more immersive as they play out. Pelican are no strangers to bringing a range of influences to their approach. They’ve been celebrated for over 20 years for the central innovation of their sound, which in its infancy dared to mix shades of post-hardcore and emo in with crunch-tone-but-pastoral and largely-undeniable riffing, finding escape in the nod and richness of melody in the guitars. Flickering Resonance shimmers brighter than its title would lead one to believe, and across its span, it reminds the listener who Pelican were without sounding like a ‘gritty 2025 reboot’ of the band circa the Champions of Sound tour or a hackneyed attempt to lead the songs somewhere they don’t want to go.
But the secret ingredient here, in the ebbs and flows of “Evergreen” as it rolls out from the wistful leads of “Gulch” near the start of the record and the mellower drift of the finale “Wandering Mind,” is love. To listen to a song like “Indelible,” well, that’s what’s indelible about it. That’s what’s evergreen in “Evergreen.” It’s there in the takeoff after the quieter stretch in “Pining for Ever,” certainly, and it’s in the early shove of “Specific Resonance,” the quiet stretch and the later chugging ride to the finish. The album bleeds it. It’s the band’s love for each other, their love for the music, for making these songs both in the writing and recording sense, and the kind of chemistry that could only result from knowing each other as deeply as these players do.
Look. I’m not purporting Flickering Resonance as a sequel to their 2003 landmark debut, Australasia (discussed here), or anything like that — and I mean it. As much as “Cascading Crescent” and “Evergreen” and even the swayingly post-punk divergence of the penultimate “Flickering Stillness,” which comes to an engrossing crescendo that’s like being hugged by an old friend, are Pelican being themselves, they’re not Pelican trying to be themselves in their 20s. There’s no attempt to pretend that the years between then and now haven’t happened, and the maturity of the band underscoring is what makes the manifestation of their emotional expression so vivid.
This is a band who’ve been around the world I don’t know how many times, and no matter what hyperbole I could muster up to toss out about Flickering Resonance would pale in the face of that which they’ve received from far cooler sources over the course of their career. They don’t need to be putting out records at all if they don’t want to — it’s not the kind of thing where they’re locked into a label’s album cycle — and no doubt every individual member has their own life outside the band. That’s what happens when bands get older. Families, jobs, lives. And for every second of Flickering Resonance, whether it’s loud, quiet, riffing or exploring, they all just sound so happy to be there. I don’t know the recording circumstances, if they were all in the same room tracking with the esteemed Sanford Parker (Buried at Sea, Corrections House, Minsk, etc.) or in their respective living rooms playing to a laptop, but if you have found yourself in need of solace living on planet Earth in 2025 — whatever that might mean to you — Pelican‘s exuded joy for playing these songs together can be something to hold onto.
It’s a celebration of creativity, sure, but it’s really more human than that, more primal, and the lead guitar singing phrases no words could in “Indelible” tells a lot of the story. Love as a radical act. There’s no flinching away from what the last years have wrought, and while escapism and hypnotics have always been part of what Pelican do, the urgency here is to come together rather than to flee. Flickering Resonance is nothing if not a reminder to tell your friends you love them. It’s never going to be an answer to everything, but in the comings and goings of making their way into middle age, Pelican have landed in a place where they realize and understand how special this band is and most of all how special they are to each other. No part — really, none of it — sounds obligatory.
I’ve been a Pelican fan for a long time, and it would contradict the honesty of Flickering Resonance — oh, that last solo reaching out of “Wandering Mind” — to pretend otherwise. So if you want to say I’m impartial or I’m hearing things in the riffs that aren’t there, fine. I respectfully disagree, and I don’t think hearing the band valuing each other as they twist through the surge of “Pining for Ever” cheapens the listening experience at all. Rather, a great resource Flickering Resonance has working for it is its sense of openness and letting the parts of songs breathe; a hard-won patience on the band’s part that goes beyond the payoff of this or that individual track. Pelican step up, declare themselves across 51 minutes, and are gone again. In that time, they reinforce the boundary-pushing aspects of their early work without feeling any need to ‘go back’ in the songs themselves, acknowledging the past and moving inevitably forward, driven by the love, friendship and creativity that’s held them together all the while.
