Pelican - Flickering Resonance

Pelican are often regarded as elite grandees of instrumental post-rock / post-metal and they are also known for their long gestation periods between album releases. Flickering Resonance is their first proper record in about seven years. Known for creating widescreen soundscapes from fairly straight-forward rock motifs, their loose approach is perhaps one of the more ‘jam session’ styles out of the post-rock pack. Flickering Resonance is a textbook title for a post-rock record, but while their previous releases have been bound up with controlled tension, this is decidedly more summery.

Tracks such as the introductory Gulch, Evergreen and are almost redolent of alternative rock from the 1990s, dare we say slightly rocked up grunge. Sunny, loose riffs crank away and noodling leads are breezy and carefree. Pelican do have a partial desert-session, sun-bleached delivery style and Specific Resonance has elements of this without decelerating into stoner rock with a lovely, dreamy breakdown of sun-dappled plucks. The just-above-mid-pace cheerful, nodding riff could easily accompany a roof-down drive on a late summer afternoon.

There are still moments when Pelican grimace and clench teeth. The flabby arsed, sweaty bass and rowdy chords of Cascading Crescent create a grease-spoon bluesy hard rock jam reminiscent of the desert riffs of INTRCPTR; it could be the soundtrack to a beer advert as could the slower sun-bleached gravelly Pining for Ever that slowly blooms into a sublime, classic post-rock.

These rock outs are, however, occasional rather than uniform across the record and the albums signs off with the gently warming restraint of Flickering Stillness and its vaguely whimsical and cheerful noodling guitar work, an uplifting track that is a mellow celebration of gratitude and the good times. Concluding the album is Wandering Mind, perhaps one of the strongest tracks Pelican have penned. Beginning  as an understated, brooding distillation of Red Sparrowes and the trippy heatwave meditations of Earth, it develops over eight minutes as one gradual build to a post-rock crescendo that is truly sublime, meditative, soaring.

Flickering Resonance demonstrates how an irreducibly uncomplicated approach by a standard four-piece rock arrangement can create dynamism, variation and scope. Flickering Resonance is free-spirited, more contented in the present moment and less agitated than the mechanized clangs of previous works yet dovetails into them. A soundtrack of acceptance.

Released via Run for Cover Records. Here is a bandcamp link: https://pelican.bandcamp.com/