4 out of 5
Label: Run for Cover Records
Produced by: Sanford Parker
It took me reading a few other reviews to realize what wasn’t clicking into place for me when listening to Pelican’s seventh album, Flickering Resonance: that this is now fully alt rock territory.
Genre shouldn’t really matter, of course – just the music; just the output – but I’ve been having a mental battle with Pelican since their first EP blew my mind a million years ago, and I’ve been mostly mightily on their bandwagon ever since. “Mostly” because of this battle, in which I try to defend the band’s sound against the tons of other instrumental metal acts that have popped up in their wake, and define some difference between Pelican “evolving” and then maybe also… not really being metal anymore. And although ‘alt rock’ has been a tag applied to the band before, Flickering Resonance is the first post-Hydra Head release that really feels consistently not metal; and Run for Cover is a pretty perfect label for that as well, as it ditches associations with genre that HH had / Southern Lord have. I feel fully equipped to now stare at this 25 year old band and accept: they’re just a rock band, y’all. Flickering Resonance is a very fitting title, then, as Laurent Schroeder-Lebec is back, and this would be that release from that reliable instrumental rock act that tosses in some metal chugga chuggas here and there – a flickering resonance with a heavier genre, if you will – while delivering seven very solid chunks of song.
I mean none of this desultorily. This is a grand Pelican album. The last few releases have seen the group trying to find their way back to a heavier sound overall, with Forever Becoming an appreciably audacious swing at combining their more ambient elements with the heft in one go, and Nighttime Stories a somewhat forced attempt at being noisy; FR stops being complex or precious about it and just goes arena sized. Opener Gulch is a fine example of that, with the kind of beat drop and celebratory melody that would work perfectly at a sports game, and followups Evergreen and Indelible nail a 90s grunge aesthetic that’s immediately satisfying – maybe especially for those who loved that era, heh – and proves, more than a lot of those inbetween Pelican releases, that vocalists are never a requirement to give a song a good sense of verse-chorus-verse and melody.
But: coded in there, you might see some notes that suggest this album as hitting its marks, so to speak. That is the case. Pelican has never been the most complex of acts, but I think they achieved a particular sound through a combination of doomy repetition and soaring, heavy releases (at least in their more definitive tracks); the guitar interplay on here will sound familiar, but the group has prioritized getting to that “soaring, heavy” part, making the album, for better or worse, all singles. This is very accessible, which makes it terribly fun and probably rocks live, but after spending a bit of time with the disc, it’s pretty ephemeral as well.
Ultimately, I’m okay with that. The last few Pelican releases have been a gamble of ups and downs, with soft spots on the discs that make me itch to skip some songs. Flickering Resonance isn’t a gamble; enduring or not, it is an assured win from start to finish.
