Man It Feels Like Space Again Album Art
A few months ago, I praised the ongoing psych-popular revival currently happening in Australia – bands in all the major metropolises (and numerous pocket-size towns) playing the sort of wonky, experimental, fuzzy, sparkling, multi-faceted, stoner rock music and so dear of early Pink Floyd, 70s Todd Rundgren and fifty-fifty the balls-out boogie of Australian pioneers Coloured Balls.
I honed in on three bands, mainly: Brisbane's summery John Steel Singers, the woozy rhythms of Blank Realm and the monstrous pop groove of Tame Impala.
I omitted to mention the fantastic fun-speckled splendour and collective vision of Pond, even so – a grievous oversight as Pond are front, left and centre of the Australian psych-pop scene, as the gluttonous sprawl of their sixth studio album, Man it 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 information technology. Not in a bad mode, just in the sense of freedom that permeates songs such equally the fantastically catchy space rock opener, Waiting Around For Grace, a bit similar the Flaming Lips dorsum in the mid-90s, earlier they became irritating.
Or Tame Impala themselves.
Indeed, the two bands are then entwined that sometimes Pond are downgraded every bit a Tame Impala adjunct. That's non quite fair: if anything, it'southward the other way round. Not just practice the bands share a audio and a city (Perth), they also 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. (There's simply one 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 United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland 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 Pond songs. Kevin likes to go everyone in Tame playing the correct riffs and chords whereas Pond are [far looser]... Kevin has long, direct hair and I have a white-boy 'fro. To my ears, Tame and Pond sound completely different."
Information technology's tempting to think of Pond as the more unruly, dorky, incestuous lovers of Tame Impala – not for them their concerns about hitting the aforementioned note twice or strait-jacketing their songs into recognisable structures. And while the main unmarried Elvis' Flaming Star may share much of the same, wonderfully exhilarant 70s-era glam stomp as Elephant (think Marc Bolan transported to a futuristic world populated by D'Angelo fans), elsewhere it's non so straightforward.
Explosions, unearthly sound effects, trippy percussion and quintuple-tracked vocals populate the album. The synths on the title track fizzle and oomph like a less together MGMT earlier setting off in another direction altogether. Sitting Up On Our Crane croons mournfully to itself similar UK cult band Goggle box Personalities in their psych phase, or perhaps John Lennon in i of his more than indulgent moments (and at that place were enough of those). Holding Out For You, meanwhile, is the sort of graceful slide through cloud-baiting childhood fantasyland and psychedelia that makes me still miss Mercury Rev then very much.
It's not all wonderment and wigged-out head trips, though. Sometimes the indulgence becomes too 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 Right Side is far likewise in thrall to George Clinton'south surreal funk ring Parliament Funkadelic to bear repeated listens.
Medicine Hat too is worryingly directly – Ryan crooning nasally as the band play plodding state rock, a little like Bob Dylan with the Band behind him. It's ok by itself, but 1 hopes this is a one-off abnormality, not a future direction. Commonwealth of australia already has any number of bands that sound like this, merely only i Pond.
That'southward fine though – you have to expect a little uneveness from such a deranged and schizo ring. Indulgent and trippy and sometimes off-kilter – but a whole heap of fun. And they brand marvellous spaced-out videos, too.
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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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