Toward the end of my conversation with Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, the subject of happiness comes up and how it connects with Pelican’s new album, Flickering Resonance. “There’s a cathartic flow state that you get from playing music, but none of us are heavy people,” he says. “We want the lightness and the charm of our interactions as friends to speak through the music.”
“We happen to be drawn to heavier sounds, to present this sort of internal landscape, but it’s never with the intent of we need to write a heavy song,” he continues. “It’s our chosen pasture—down-tuned, weighty, sort of layered heavy stuff.”
Flickering Resonance is heavy, like burying yourself in the scent of a beloved’s well-worn denim jacket in the first hug you’ve given them after a year away. Because, after all, this album is a joyous reunion. It’s the first Pelican album in six years, and the first since Laurent rejoined the band in 2022 after what he calls a ten-year “sabbatical.”
“It started as a sort of burgeoning feeling,” says Laurent when discussing his departure from the band he founded alongside fellow guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw and brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg (bass and drums, respectively). “It wasn’t some sort of catalyst or someone getting canceled or something. It was just like—I am burning out on touring.”
Pelican was over a decade old, with four albums and just as many EPs under their belt, when Laurent departed in 2012. The stress of being in a touring band in your thirties took its toll. “We started to fight over dumb shit. All of us were in committed relationships,” he says. “And I wanted to do something else. And I wanted to be a father.”
The dependability and stability of the 9-to-5 world were too attractive for Laurent to pass up. “So I took a break,” says Laurent. The split was amicable, and Laurent said that his friendships with the other members remained solid (“although, we probably didn’t speak to each other for a little bit”) as Pelican continued with Dallas Thomas replacing him.
“It’s a wonderful segment of the band’s history,” says Laurent. The records featuring Dallas—2013’s Forever Becoming and 2019’s Nighttime Stories—have their own “unique muscular blueprint.”
“I remember listening and going, ‘okay. Cool. This is a version of the band without me,’” says Laurent. “Forever Becoming is a lot of Brian and Trevor’s work, and Nighttime Stories is a product of the four of them coming together.”
Laurent’s departure was probably the best thing for Pelican. Before his sabbatical, Laurent was the band’s principal songwriter. And when he left, it was a sink-or-swim moment. Laurent’s absence created space for others to take the lead, and the break was good for him, too.
“When I started playing again, let’s say five or six years ago, I found myself burdened by the fact that everything I wrote sounded like a continuation of Pelican themes,” he says. “And it wasn’t for lack of trying—different tunings or just even different configurations. I just found myself going back to melodic chord progressions that could easily be transposed into Pelican songs.”
Laurent’s songcraft is “only one component” of the band’s new music. “The role that Bryan now plays, rhythmically, and the way that he and Larry interlock—and a lot of the glue and the interplay and the sparkle and the joy that Trevor brings to the songs,” he adds. “Everyone’s got their role to play.”
“And I have accepted and relish in mine, because I can,” he adds. “Let’s say right now: we finished a new song. It’s like, eight minutes long, but it’s just me and Trevor, and Bryan is working his way in. But at some point, Trevor was like, ‘that riff sounds like this other one. We should nix it.’ Whereas in the past, I would have been, ‘Oh, come on. We gotta keep in there.’ Now, I’m like, ‘you’re probably right.’”
Laurent admits that Trevor has “an intuitive understanding” of what works for Pelican, having worked ten years more with the group than him. “He saw it through a totally different point of origin and execution.”
But there was one thing Laurent personally wanted his return to the band to achieve. “I wanted a record that represented all of us, one that felt like it had something new, but also paid reverence to the original era,” he says. “A lot of the major chord work, and some of those progressions that were a little less dark.”
Pelican accomplished that and so much more. Flickering Resonance is a work of post-rock magnificence. The opener, “Gulch,” hits like the rays of a new sunrise on tear-stained cheeks, the first smile after a night of sorrow. “Indelible” gazes up into a moonlit sky, inspiring wonder at the heavens and peace at the darkness between stars. Rivers of tranquility run throughout the album, pooling at the end with “Wandering Mind.” The songs are long but never overstay their welcome. There is no need for a singer: the band vocalizes emotional complexities just fine.
Subjective as taste might be, Flickering Resonance is the best album featuring Pelican’s classic lineup.
“Some of the themes are for sure our interconnectedness, our sense of community as players and the world that we come from, but also finding each other,” says Laurent. “It’s never an active thing—like, let’s sit down and write a song about how much we like each other or how we want to spread joy in an otherwise ruthless, callous world. But I’m always happy that how we feel translates, because there’s no lyrics to make it happen.”
This brings us back to happiness. Flickering Resonance captures how these moments of euphoria have weight. These feelings are often portrayed as effervescent and buoyant, but true happiness engulfs.
Flickering Resonance declares this proudly. “The heaviness of happiness is exactly how I hope people remember this record,” says Laurent.
At the end of the conversation, I asked Laurent about a social media post from writer Cooper Lund I saw a few weeks earlier: “Every time I go to a post-rock show, I’m reminded that a post-rock band is just a jam band that doesn’t have fun.”
“I think we’re having a ton of fun,” says Laurent with a chuckle. “I think that people need to stop taking things so seriously, sometimes.” Laurent also notes that Pelican doesn’t take itself too seriously. When they revamped their Instagram, they called themselves “post-everything.”
“It was a brilliant, efficacious way of saying we’re just going to do the thing that we do, and you can categorize it however you want,” he adds.
“And I feel like Flickering Resonance, for me, represents the sum of all the previous parts, but I hope it opens interest in discovering the other records. And obviously, I think there’s more to come. So, that’s a good sign.”
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