Review: Pelican – Flickering Resonance
With the return of former guitarist Laurent Lebec in 2022 (last seen featured on 2009’s What We All Come To Need) arousing hope in some fans of a return to the sound of a record like 2005’s The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw, Flickering Resonance shows that it is still decidedly a modern Pelican album, with everything that entails.
Flickering Resonance is muddled. At its worst, it represents a sort of creative nadir for “post-metal” and “atmospheric sludge”— whatever those words mean in 2025—in the same way late era Explosions In The Sky and God Is An Astronaut did for post-rock. How initially a broad term for largely unrelated bands accomplishing the same thing (rock instrumentation that encroached into 20th century classical and electronic music) would see itself change. A decade on from its coining, the iconoclastic sound of the likes of Long Fin Killie or early Tortoise are mostly replaced by the reified, canonized sound of post-rock as a capital-g Genre: slow-building, instrumental rock music that explodes in often uniform climaxes, the original influence of the genre lost through time. Post-metal and atmo-sludge pioneers have had a similar experience. Where so many bands were once coming out of hardcore but slowing things down, embracing outside influence, now decades onward post-metal has long become crystalized as its own sound and its tropes have long choked the genre to death. Functionally, the depth of a lot of contemporary atmo-sludge isn’t far removed from a Snow Patrol record or something.
At Flickering Resonance‘s best, however, we see a record treading its own path by interpreting the sounds of emo, indie rock and stoner metal into its own distinct creative palette. Opening track “Gulch” welcomes the album with this persistent ostinato that drops into a melodic main riff. For all its bombast, “Gulch” is in many ways a heavier, instrumental pop-punk song, and it genuinely shows the band operating at a higher level than they have on recent records. It feels purposeful and driven, even if its drops, stops and bridges feels mechanical. An album of this, a sort of pop-punk-meets-sludge fusion, would have been an interesting direction for the record to head in, but ultimately its something only teased at throughout the rest of the album.
“Evergreen” continues to establish the sound of Flickering Resonance, this warmer, more measured sound that builds on the the riffing style of “Gulch” but is ultimately less memorable, save for a section of clean guitar near the halfway point that’s accented with a thick, detuned bassline.
“Indelible” is itself built around a fairly remedial, chugging riff with the song only occasionally coming to life when it incorporates elements of blues into its riffing. The distorted bass that follows the break helps add emphasis and purpose to a song lacking direction, and finally in its second half it starts to build to a climax that feels earned—only to end abruptly in what sounds like an act of pure musical cowardice. It feels less like subversion, cutting the ground out from under the listener to shake them from their stylistic expectations, and more like an underwritten demo take.
There’s more of a deliberately emotive pull to a track like “Specific Resonance,” and it manages to do so without feeling manipulative or heart-tugging. The longest track on the album, it totally earns it: just a very musically open track, with these dueling clean guitar arpeggios that flit between evoking wistful nostalgia and lost futures. It’s not a huge departure musically but paradoxically feels much more alive in its more measured, transient writing. “Cascading Crescent” feels completely counter to this, where the punch of the riffs is expected to do the bulk of the heavy lifting in a track without much of an identity of its own, either melodically, atmospherically or rhythmically.
With a name like “Pining For Forever,” you might expect something more in line with “Specific Resonance,” but it’s a return to the the style of “Indelible,” albeit a more successful version of what that track attempted to do. It still retains that style of plodding, lethargic riffing that renders the early portion of the track feeling immobile, but is structured much more maturely, featuring the best guitar performances on the record from the halfway mark onwards.
“Flickering Stillness” is a marked departure on the tracklist, opening as a heavily bass-driven track with these small, accentuated sections of open chords that grow into heavy stabs of riffing, helping juxtapose and punctuate the smoothness of the bass playing. As it builds with its twinkling arpeggios and oddly playful (yet melancholic) atmosphere, it reminds me a lot of the warmth you’d hear on early math rock records. As one of the partial title tracks alongside “Specific Resonance,” “Flickering Stillness” feels like the centerpiece of Flickering Resonance: easily the best track on the album, one of Pelican’s best tracks period.
Closing track “Wandering Mind” is suitably named, rooted in a bass riff from which the rest of the instrumentation grows around, feeling like variations on one idea. While that sort of pondering was detrimental early in the tracklist, the placement of “Wandering Mind” after “Flickering Stillness” gives it more of a contemplative feel. In isolation, it’s a track that stays in first gear even in its heavier moments, that could risk sounding like an extended jam session, but in context it goes to show how important pacing is on an album, and how that flow can completely effect how a track is experienced.
There’s a lot on Flickering Resonance that isn’t a thousand miles away from a million post-rock-skramz hybrid demos that try to blend both worlds, but with its comparably lush production and almost total lack of bite, it’s an album that feels like a hollow evocation of its influences. In its weakest moments, it sounds like like the most shallow type of prettiness, like a generative picture of a bouquet of flowers. In aiming for beauty, Pelican hit artifice.
2.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Flickering Resonance is out now on Run For Cover Records.
