Pond Man It Feels Like Space Again Review
A few months ago, I praised the ongoing psych-pop revival currently happening in Australia – bands in all the major metropolises (and numerous small-scale towns) playing the sort of wonky, experimental, fuzzy, sparkling, multi-faceted, stoner rock music so beloved of early Pinkish Floyd, 70s Todd Rundgren and even the balls-out boogie of Australian pioneers Coloured Balls.
I honed in on 3 bands, mainly: Brisbane's summery John Steel Singers, the woozy rhythms of Blank Realm and the monstrous popular groove of Tame Impala.
I omitted to mention the fantastic fun-speckled splendour and collective vision of Pond, however – a grievous oversight as Pond are front, left and centre of the Australian psych-pop scene, as the gluttonous sprawl of their 6th studio anthology, Man information technology Feels Like Space Once again, proves.
The album was recorded over several months in a small studio in Collingwood, Melbourne – where several band members slept rough – and it sounds like it. Not in a bad fashion, simply in the sense of liberty that permeates songs such as the fantastically catchy infinite rock opener, Waiting Around For Grace, a bit similar the Flaming Lips dorsum in the mid-90s, before they became irritating.
Or Tame Impala themselves.
Indeed, the two bands are so entwined that sometimes Swimming are downgraded as a Tame Impala adjunct. That's non quite fair: if annihilation, information technology's the other style circular. Not but do the bands share a audio and a city (Perth), they likewise share members – when Nick Allbrook left Tame Impala a couple of years back to concentrate on Swimming and other projects, he was replaced by another member of Pond. (At that place'due south only i member of Tame Impala who hasn't been in Pond.)
The truth of the matter though is that the two bands are distinct entities. Core member Joseph Ryan explained the differences to U.k. publication The Stool Pigeon thus: "Kevin [Parker, Tame Impala frontman] writes pretty much all the Tame songs. Jay [Watson], Nick and I write all the Swimming songs. Kevin likes to become everyone in Tame playing the right riffs and chords whereas Pond are [far looser]... Kevin has long, straight hair and I take a white-boy 'fro. To my ears, Tame and Pond sound completely different."
It'due south tempting to think of Pond as the more unruly, dorky, incestuous lovers of Tame Impala – non for them their concerns well-nigh hitting the same note twice or strait-jacketing their songs into recognisable structures. And while the master single Elvis' Flaming Star may share much of the same, wonderfully intoxicating 70s-era glam stomp as Elephant (think Marc Bolan transported to a futuristic world populated by D'Angelo fans), elsewhere it'due south not so straightforward.
Explosions, unearthly sound furnishings, trippy percussion and quintuple-tracked vocals populate the album. The synths on the title rail fizzle and oomph like a less together MGMT before setting off in another management altogether. Sitting Up On Our Crane croons mournfully to itself like United kingdom cult ring Goggle box Personalities in their psych phase, or possibly John Lennon in ane of his more than indulgent moments (and there were plenty of those). Holding Out For You lot, meanwhile, is the sort of graceful slide through deject-baiting childhood fantasyland and psychedelia that makes me notwithstanding miss Mercury Rev so very much.
It's not all wonderment and wigged-out head trips, though. Sometimes the indulgence becomes as well overbearing, and you start wishing Pond would return to planet earth, if just for a moment. Zond is a bit of a downer, and Outside Is the Correct Side is far too in thrall to George Clinton's surreal funk ring Parliament Funkadelic to bear repeated listens.
Medicine Hat too is worryingly straight – Ryan crooning nasally as the band play plodding country stone, a fiddling like Bob Dylan with the Ring behind him. It's ok by itself, merely one hopes this is a one-off abnormality, not a time to come direction. Australia already has any number of bands that sound like this, but but 1 Swimming.
That'southward fine though – y'all have to expect a picayune uneveness from such a deranged and schizo ring. Indulgent and trippy and sometimes off-kilter – just a whole heap of fun. And they make marvellous spaced-out videos, likewise.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/jan/23/pond-man-it-feels-like-space-again-indulgent-trippy-and-at-times-off-kilter
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