Interview: Pelican Guitarists Discuss New Music an…

Post-metal/rock outfit Pelican are an institution in the genre, having existed at this point for more than two active decades. The December issue of Decibel features a studio report with guitarists Trevor de Brauw and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec, who is playing on his first major Pelican release since 2012’s Ataraxia / Taraxis, so you’ll have to pick that issue up to read every detail about the band’s new album. However, Decibel‘s conversation with the pair ran for nearly an hour, far more than could fit in print.

While you’re waiting for your copy of Decibel #242 to arrive, you can read the outtakes from the extensive interview discussing Schroeder-Lebec’s return to Pelican and ushering in a new era of the band.

It’s been about five years since you released new music. What’s changed in the band in that time?
LSL: The pandemic happened. We did a two-song EP earlier in the year both digitally and on cassette, as a preview and to say “Hey, there’s life in the band.” That would be the first new music and one of the key sort of elements of that [is that] I’m back in the band where I wasn’t on the last two full lengths.

TDB: I think our playing style evolved in a different way over the course of the 10 years Laurant was not with us. When Laurant returned, he brought a bevy of new riffs and song ideas to work off of but it was within the rubric of… we sort of had to adapt his original mode of playing with what’s happened in the band since, which I think is a bit more heady and we used improvisation and jamming a lot more as compositional tools, and took the songs that might have sounded like picking up where we left off to a space that’s a little more psychedelic and interesting. 

LSL: Outside of getting into reasons for leaving, when you as a player exit out of something that’s been a huge part of your life creatively, for me it almost felt like in some time arrested way, I tried to do some other things musically but the stuff I wanted to write was where I would have picked up if I had stayed in the band. It’s like reinserting yourself into a novel that continued; I died off and I’m back in chapter seven. It’s the same personality and in many ways it’s the same playing style, but it was really interesting to see the ways in which it still worked but also the ways it was going to be totally different. It proved to be a real creative juice moment and even though it seems like 5 years, it’s really only in the span of the last year and a half to two years that we hit the ground running, in terms of writing this batch of songs. 

You rejoined and started new music 2 years ago?
LSL: We had a string of live dates and that was really the first engagement. I don’t think that returning as a full member of even envisioning writing in the early days was a part of the conversation. There was some European tour engagement that couldn’t be let go of …. The next sort of thing that we worked on was a set of covers for Numero Group and I think that’s when we started to see “Hey, maybe we should write some stuff that’s new and felt fresh,” but you didn’t want to put one foot in front of the other too fast.

TDB: In the depths of the pandemic, we weren’t even sure what the future of the band was. We kind of loosely started writing stuff in March of 2020, but when the pandemic happened we just sort of hit a wall. 

Bryan [Herweg, bass] and I had apprehensions about starting new stuff just because the process of writing Nighttime Stories was so protracted and difficult until, like Laurant said, we did those covers and things just gelled really fast on those. The process of writing this album is under two years, inclusive of the two songs we put out earlier this year. Once we got going, we just never slowed down. 

You said this time around you relied a lot more on improv and stuff like that as compositional tools. When you say that, do you mean you would do a lot of jamming in the studio or at practice?
TDB: I don’t want to mischaracterize. I think that was a lot more during Nighttime Stories and that affected our playing style: Larry [Herweg, drums], Bryan and myself. Those songs, yeah, we did do a lot of in person working it out in the space. 

Usually, one of us, and I contributed the least in terms of core riffs, Bryan or Laurant, would bring in riffs or partial song ideas and we would just start building them and see where they went. The three of us would flesh out a strong structure in the space; it was definitely a very collaborative process between the three of us, feeling out where we wanted to go.

LSL: One thing I want to add is I think, and I can’t say this for every band, but in the early days of being a band or younger musician, I think you get very attached to the stuff you bring to practice. One of the things that’s really refreshing about this round is the inherent trust that exists between the four of us that in many ways leads to improvisation. This sort of gentle pushing of each other to not only bring out the best in each other, but not to do what we’ve always done, happened in a way that was more organic and pleasant than I think I’d really ever been used to. There was less self doubt and more real open communication that I think led us to a batch of songs that everyone in the band could connect with and find relatable. 

It was a really open and interesting approach, and the improvisation was more so an emotional improvisation. Just taking some chances, like “Hey, let’s be more daring with this” or “That sounds like something we’ve done before.” It is a merger of different approaches to writing that I think are emblematic of the band throughout its eras, but also ushering in something new. 

That’s always going to be the challenge of an instrumental band. I was talking to Trevor the other day about how in the absence of lyrics, I think it’s the guitars that are talking about each other. I think there are a lot of riffs and the challenge is getting the riffs and the general instrumentation to act in dialogue. 

TDB: I think that process has become very intuitive. I guess that’s all I can say about it. We’ve been doing it for so long. It’s almost a challenge to think where vocals could fit.

Are there themes or ideas you’re trying to communicate?
LSL: Initially, no; eventually, yes. I think it’s the case of expressing yourself abstractly and when you look at the pieces on the board, you then go, “Well here are some ways these could be connected thematically.” 

It’s certainly not, “Let’s write a concept record and come up with the music around it,” but it’s also not the type of instrumental stuff where we find some art and some random song titles and hope people can draw their own conclusions. I think there’s a lot of talking out what might be themes that resonate and speak to the different band members that would exist outside of politics or anything more linear, but what are some things on a deep level that are impactful to us and how can we weave the different elements that are being played out on the music side?

TDB: Our mode has always been to follow our musical intuition and once we get a body of work together, typically there is a theme that has emerged that ties everything together. I think that’s the case with this body in the serial too, but it’s not like we go into the process trying to express a certain concept.

I know that you haven’t even heard the mixes or the masters or anything like that yet, but when this comes out what will that look like for you? Does writing a record kind of drain your creative tank for a while?
TDB: We had to hit pause because the songs were still coming. We’re ready to jump back in.

Does this sound like a distinctly new era of Pelican, so to speak?
TDB: Very much so. It’s very difficult from the last album in particular. In a sense musically, it harkens back to the period of time that I consider to be the peak of the Laruant years (Ire – thing we all need), but through the prism of this whole new dimension we’ve stepped into, in terms of our playing but also the way we write and communicate musically. 

We debuted the album before we went into the studio. The experience, standing on stage with these four guys and playing only new material, felt like our first show. Even though this is a deeply established relationship and we have this deep deep connection as friends and as musicians, it does feel like the beginning of something totally new. It feels like the beginning of a new band or something. Not that people wouldn’t recognize it’s Pelican, but it does feel very fresh to me.