Flickering Resonance: In Conversation with Pelican’s Trevor Shelley de Brauw

Pelican’s concoction of tonal ferocity and melodic majesty has always attracted various emotional responses. From the cavernous sprawl of Mammoth and the ocean’s roar of Nightendday, to the euphoric Red Ran Amber and Far from Fields, the Chicago veterans have been the exponents of the kind of transcendental compositions that burn deep into the soul.

Emotional response through song is both personal and open to interpretation. The true depths of sadness, unreachable without being trigged by another emotion. Sadness, alongside tension and anger, all feature prominently throughout the Pelican story, and when they collide, it results in some of the finest instrumental-based music since the turn of the century. Post-metal, post-rock, whichever it may be, Pelican is firmly entrenched at the summit.

Since their 2001 Untitled EP, from the opening notes of Pulse, Trevor Shelley de Brauw, Laurent Schroeder-Lebec and brothers Larry and Bryan Herweg have made every post a winner. Their debut long-player Australasia (2003), an avalanche of noise. The walking sea of turbulence that is The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw (2005), arguably the band at the peak of their powers, while City of Echoes (2007) and What We All Come to Need (2009) still hold up as if they were conceived from the vaults yesterday.

Following the release of the latter, Schroeder-Lebec parted ways with the band. Replaced by Dallas Thomas in 2011 as a touring guitarist before becoming a fully-fledged member a year later, Pelican navigated through their next era by adding two vital chapters – the excellent Forever Becoming (2013) and Nighttime Stories (2019).

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, the band reissued Australiasia via Thrill Jockey, which eventually led to Schroeder-Lebec rejoining the group, and celebrating their past with shows featuring the original line-up, Pelican began to look forward., working on what would become last year’s Adrift / Tending the Embers EP.

It was these recording sessions that spawned their excellent new album and first with Schroeder-Lebec in 16 years, Flickering Resonance. Once again at their transcendental best, Flickering Resonance sparkles with cadence and roars with menace in what is one of Pelican’s most defining statements.

At eight tracks spanning over 51 minutes, it begins with the seismic force of Gulch. Heaving with tonality, it’s the kind of song that sends tremors through oak. Elsewhere, Evergreen and Flickering Stillness sees Pelican surge into the maelstrom with the kind of humid riff-a-rolla that causes sensory overload.

A series of droning undercurrents of dread built on the back of What We All Come to Need’s watershed moments, Indelible is like a crunching groan of despair, while Cascading Crescent sees Shelley de Brauw and Schroeder-Lebec’s intricate guitar interplay move at flick-knife speed.

On either side of Cascading Crescent is Flickering Resonance’s defining moments in Specific Resonance and Pining For Ever. Pelican, the conduits between sadness and anger, and with the two emotions smashed together through scintillating quiet / loud dynamics, it unlocks the kind of dopamine rush that sees Pelican at their blistering best.

As its title suggests, closing cut, Wandering Mind, sees Pelican deliver something akin to hypnotic liberation. The sonic emotional vistas that have dictated just why their music is so vital, and as the curtains are drawn, Pelican leaves you wanting more. Speaking to Shelley de Brauw via Zoom last month, he confirmed that there will be just that – the band, already at work on the next record. “We’re meeting up in four hours to keep working on it,” he says.

Also releasing music alongside Steven Hess and Colin DeKuiper in the equally excellent RLYR, based on the strength of Flickering Resonance, it feels like a new dawn for Pelican. Speaking to Shelley de Brauw, it’s evident that this is a band not growing old gracefully, but just getting started again. And with the bit between their teeth, while Shelley de Brauw reflects on the band’s past during our conversation, now more than ever, a clear path has been forged as the band ceaselessly march ahead.

Sun 13: When Pelican started out, you never really sounded like other bands from Chicago. Did you consider yourself outliers in those early stages? 

Trevor Shelley de Brauw: “I guess so, but also not really, because we just sprung up in the Chicago DIY hardcore scene. I don’t think that there was necessarily a defined sound to hardcore of that era. Now – to an extent – we were outliers, because we were doing something that was a little bit more metallic than other bands in the scene. And also, we were instrumental, which other bands weren’t really doing, and our songs were significantly longer. 

“In the years that would follow, I think that scenes started to become more regimented, whereas when we got into it, there was sort of a Venn diagram of different scenes. A lot of the shows at that time were taking place at The Fireside Bowl. The booker there, Brian Peterson, was really into these bills that would be a collision of emo and punk and ska and rockabilly… every single show was like a grab bag of so many different things. There was such a premium on stylistic diversity, that maybe because we came up in that specific era, that’s just how it happened for us.”

S13: You mentioned emo there. Was that where you met Geoff Rickley and how you came to work with him on the B-side version of Cascading Crescent?

TSDB: “I didn’t meet Geoff until many years later. I think our first real collision with that era of emo was when we went out on tour with Thrice and Circa Survive, which actually came in the wake of the Taste of Chaos tour, which is where we met Deftones and Thrice. I met Geoff professionally through his band, United Nations, and our friendship sprung up that way.”

S13: It’s interesting, because you’re wearing a Uniform shirt in your new press photos, and I know Mike from Uniform has worked with Geoff, too, so it felt like a weird six degrees of separation. That’s the beauty of DIY culture, I suppose…

TSDB: “Yeah, and I think that that speaks to what I was saying before about that era of hardcore. Uniform, Thursday, us, that late ’90s, early ’00s… our grounding is in that era. Maybe on the face of it, those three bands don’t have that much in common, but we toured with Uniform, and I know Geoff wrote the bio for [their] recent album [American Standard]. We’re all just friends and admirers of each other’s artistic output.”

S13: Another facet of Pelican is locality. That metallic sound that you spoke of calls to mind machinery and the working classes of the Midwest, in my mind. Is that something that has been the band’s focus over the years?

TSDB: “Not so much direct lived experience – we’re all from middle class families – so to the extent that it’s there, it’s drawn more from our influences. One of the touchstone bands for us was unquestionably Godflesh in both the repetitive and hypnotic nature of the sound and the role that volume plays in creating a hypnotic state, but then also balancing the heaviness with melody – that was something that we really drew upon from Earth and Godflesh in those early records. 

“I mean, Godflesh is the reflection of a working class town. That sound is Birmingham, through and through and, having travelled and played shows there, we know the role that industry and the working class play in the architecture of that music. So, maybe it’s true that there’s a working class tie to our style, but it’s one step removed.”

S13: You’ve just finished touring with Russian Circles. Is touring harder as you get older, and secondly, did you see any major differences touring now in comparison with the past? 

TSDB: “We went out for three weeks, and it was our longest tour since 2009. For years we’ve been maintaining a two-week limit, for both sanity and to maintain day jobs. But doing this with Russian Circles gave us the opportunity to play the West Coast in the States, which we hadn’t done in a long time, largely because it’s so hard to do because everything is so spread out. Doing it in three weeks is really the only way to do it, unless you fly there and back, which introduces a host of logistical issues.

“It was so rewarding getting to play in front of these really large crowds. I think for both bands, it was more people than we’re used to playing to. I think the combination of bands really spoke to people in a strong way and drew them out of their homes and away from whatever else they had going on. (laughs)

“I think the rewards of doing that cancelled out any of the harder or more negative aspects that we’ve encountered with touring over the years. Obviously, there’s a physical and mental grind to it just because of how long the drives are and how long the days are, and how little sleep there is to be found on the road. But I think all of us are really in a space where we’re aware of how precious this thing we have is. The creation, and especially the live performance of music, is something that is so central to who we are as people, and having limited opportunities to do it nowadays, we don’t take it for granted. That opportunity is so much fuel for us that it nurtures us through whatever hard aspects there are so, in a way, despite it being harder physically at this age, I enjoy it more than I did when I was younger.”

S13: Piecing together timelines, and Laurent rejoined around the time when Thrill Jockey re-issued Australasia – was that a circuit breaker for him to rejoin the band permanently?

TSDB: “In January / February of 2020, Larry and Bryan started writing songs again for the next Pelican record, and we had shows set up for the summer. They started putting rough demos together for two songs, and then March 2020 happened and everything shut down. We don’t really do too much writing remotely, so that aspect just went completely on hold; I’m not interested in file trading as a songwriting method, I need to be in a room with musicians playing music. 

“Around that same time, Aaron [Turner] announced that he was going to stop doing Hydra Head Records. He returned all the masters to all of the bands and told them that they could do whatever they wanted to with them. We decided to license our Hydra Head releases to Thrill Jockey, and started putting together deluxe re-issues, which prompted a lot of conversations with Laurent… digging through the archives for rare photos and recordings. We were able to pour energy that would have been going towards writing into doing this instead. 

“Over time, due to a variety of reasons, Dallas decided that he no longer wanted to be in the band. He had started another band, Ready for Death, that I think spoke to his interests a little bit more – they have a new record coming out soon, too – and so these shows that we had in 2020 – Hell Fest, Freak Valley Fest and a couple others – kept getting kicked down the road until 2022 as the pandemic stretched on and on. 

“Dallas left in late 2021 and we still wanted to do the shows; we had been talking to Laurent all the time about these Thrill Jockey re-issues, and internally, the conversation was just, ‘Why don’t we ask Laurent? We can make these shows about the re-issues and can do a retrospective type of live show, which we’ve never done’. 

“Pelican has always been about what’s next, so it seemed like an interesting opportunity, especially since we had been spending so much of the two years living in the headspace of the past… to pay homage to that and really do something for longtime fans that we thought they would appreciate. Laurent was very willing to do it… he had been itching to play guitar again. It was fun, relearning the songs and getting to perform them, and we had a great tour. In the middle of it, Ken Shipley from Numero Group hit me up, and was doing a series of these seven inches where they were having modern bands cover songs from the Numero Group back catalogue…”

S13: So that’s how the Unwound cover came about?  

TSDB: “That’s right. We chose to do Unwound and Karate. Amazing, formative bands for us, and also bands that maybe people don’t associate with Pelican. We felt like it was a great opportunity, especially since we’d been doing these re-issues and lifting the curtain on the past. In a way, it felt like a really great way to tie it all together. 

“So when we began the process of learning those songs and booking studio time. I think that was the light switch moment where we thought we should write an album, and that was where Laurent fully rejoined the band. From there we wrote 11 songs, two of them we put out ourselves last year, and then we recorded a new album.”

S13: Did recording Flickering Resonance feel like old times?

TSDB: “I don’t think so. I think the early period of the band was very exciting, but we weren’t very good emotional communicators. I think sometimes there would be nascent resentments over one thing or another… I frequently wanted to pop out more here and there, and then I would write parts that others in the band would [think], ‘Maybe that doesn’t fit’. And then I would be all, ‘Fuck you. It fits!’ (laughs)… just bullshit stuff that if we knew how to communicate back then, everything would have been a lot smoother. 

“Honestly, I suspect the band would have stayed together in that line-up if we had known how to be better communicators. Not that we learned it when Laurent wasn’t in the band, but we grew up and became adults and had kids. You have to know how to communicate and how to be emotionally open with people if you’re going to have a family, and so I think there’s a whole skill set that we were able to bring to the table this time. We were able to realise our vision a lot easier and have conversations about it that felt like they weren’t fraught or loaded, and I think that that openness resulted in some of the strongest work we’ve ever done. I feel like everybody in the band is able to walk away from this record feeling like it’s the best version of themselves and the best version of what we wanted it to be.”

S13: What were the key inspirations behind the record? 

TSDB: “To me, the album is about the friendship of the four of us. Maybe that’s a little obvious of a theme, but it really is like rediscovering the joy of this partnership and all the experiences that we’ve been through and the fact that we’ve been able to persevere. Thinking back to the era that we came up in, bands would record a seven inch, maybe an album, and then break up. The lifespan of bands felt so short in punk and hardcore in that era, so to be on our seventh record and making music that feels legitimately resonant to ourselves as people, seems like a miracle. It’s so hard to do a band when you’re grown up and have careers and children and mortgages. I think that’s what it really is; a pure and unfiltered expression of our friendship and our partnership.”

S13: From the first notes of Gulch, it drops you into The Fire in Our Throats… era, which got me thinking about your writing process. Was it any different with Laurent back in the band in comparison with Dallas?

TSDB: “Yeah, it changed quite a bit. But I think the writing process for every record has been a little different. With Forever Becoming, Bryan and I would write the songs, and they would usually be way too long. Larry would come to town, and he would [say], ‘Okay, cut that part, cut that part’, and we would hone these large chunks down to concise songs. Six out of eight songs were written when Dallas joined the band, so we just fleshed out the last two songs as a four piece. 

“Nighttime Stories, almost the entire record was written in the practice space with all four of us. There were a few parts here and there that were written as demos and sent around, but for the most part, it was jamming in a room and creating stuff on the spot and seeing where it wanted to go naturally. That was a different process for the band, because we were playing live so much more than we were writing during that period, and letting songs breathe and change and evolve in the live sphere. That felt like that was the right way to do it, and it certainly suited that moment in the band. 

“This one was largely written in the practice space with Laurent, Bryan and myself, and then we would share the songs with Larry, and he would write his parts. When he came to town, we would hone them together. So much of the material on the record came from Laurent that it wouldn’t be possible for it to be anywhere near like the Nighttime Stories writing process. He and Bryan contributed the bulk of the core riffs, and then I was integral to the editing and the arranging of the final song structures and helping flesh out with melodies.”

S13: Pining For Ever captures the majestic feeling of listening to Pelican at their peak. Moments where you envision the band playing live to tape in the studio with very few overdubs. I’m not sure whether that’s the case or not? 

TSDB: “That’s fairly close to accurate.” 

S13: How integral is Sanford Parker’s work on your records?

TSDB: “I think what is great about Sanford is that he has a great understanding of tone and how different tones can fit together. One of the things that, Laurent especially but also myself… we’re interested in staying heavy with the tone but also having a great deal of clarity, because we didn’t want any of the notes to get lost in the muck. Sanford was really helpful in terms of us sculpting space for every single sound. But also, one of the things that’s so great about Sanford is that he’s a very close friend and has been for the whole duration of the band, so we feel completely comfortable in the studio with them. I think about other studio experiences that we’ve had, and I feel like the closer of friends we are with the engineer and the more comfortable we are, the better the performances are going to be.

“Having a great sounding album is important, and I’m glad that Sanford is an incredible engineer and we were able to walk away with a great sounding record, but almost as important is that a record is not just a finished work for the people in the band. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time. It’s like a photo album, so you want the studio experience to be one that you associate with good memories and fun times, because that’s what you want to get out of it when you put the record on 20 years from now.” 

S13: Naturally, a lot of people associate Pelican with heavy tones and sounds, but there’s also great emotional depth to your songs. Specific Resonance is the song where both the band’s heavy and emotional aspects intersect, to the point where it feels like the album’s centrepiece …

TSDB: “To be honest, I wasn’t sure that the song worked until I heard the recorded version.” (laughs) 

S13: Wow. That’s interesting…

TSDB: “That’s the first song that we wrote, even before Adrift / Tending the Embers. That was the very first practice that we had where Laurent, Bryan and I got together specifically to write. I had so much trepidation… going into a room after not writing for three years. We walked into the room and I knew that Laurent had some riffs, but before he’d had a chance to present anything while we were just sort of buzzing around dialling in sounds I started improvising what became the middle section of that song, and then Laurent started playing something, and then Bryan started playing on top of it… before you knew it, all these parts were happening, and I grabbed my phone and started recording so we could remember the jam. That became Specific Resonance. Obviously, we didn’t write the whole eight-minute song then and there, but that middle act of the song was the seed from which everything else grew.”

S13: The album title feels like it’s one that will develop more meaning and depth with time. Had you come up with it before recording the album, or was it afterwards?

TSDB: “I think we came up with it before we recorded the album. Most of the songs had titles, and so the title of the album is a combination of two of the titles of songs… Flickering Stillness, that song title is meant to evoke the idea of flame meditation and focusing on a flame until other sensory input drifts away from your consciousness. And Specific Resonance, which is a song title that references the creative resonance that we reach only in the specific instance when the four of us are together. 

“What I liked about combining them is we had the song on the EP last year, Tending the Embers, which was meant to evoke the fact that we have this creative vehicle, but it only works and is able to give us the warmth and the nurturing that we need if we take care and are mindful of it. So what I liked about the idea of Flickering Resonance is it calls to mind the way a flame will flicker when it’s perhaps in danger of being extinguished. So it’s sort of an acknowledgement that we know that this treasured vehicle that we have is impermanent and that we need to cherish it while we have it.” 

S13: How did you come to signing with Run For Cover?

TSDB: “I think part of it is what I was talking about before… coming from a punk and hardcore background, we felt like this record tapped into that in a way that was maybe more present than the last few records. So we were interested in exploring a partnership with a label that was maybe more tied to that world so that people would have a clearer sense or understanding of those roots in our music.

“Run For Cover is a label that I have known from many years back. I could tell from the initial conversations that they just had a great grasp. Not just on who we were and where we came from and how to tell that story, but also that they have a very evolved view of the way things have changed over the years, and that hyper awareness of the way the digital sphere has affected the way people consume and learn about music.” 

S13: Do you look back on the band’s past and think about that a lot, or are you always looking to the future? 

TSDB: “I never thought about the past until COVID made us hit the brakes and stop touring… and then when we did the reissues, it was a real reckoning with the past. Because I had just written all of those albums off, thinking this next one is better than the one that came before it, I had kind of discounted how good the records were. I don’t want to sound egotistical, but going back to them, I was surprised, [thinking], ‘Where did these ideas come from? I can’t believe that!’ It was genuinely surprising to me. (laughs)

“I’m not nostalgic for the past because I remember the baggage that came with it. I think I’m much more attuned to where we are now and grateful for where we are now, but I’m more aware of the past and the role that it plays and how we got here.”

Flickering Resonance is out tomorrow via Run For Cover. Purchase from Bandcamp.