Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
Bardo Pond have been creating their dreamy riffs for 26 years alongside a myriad of side projects and their prolific Record Store Day releases. Returning with a career defining album, ‘Under The Pines’ sees them delve into the subconscious with their transcending cosmic post-rock.
Their label Fire Records describes them as “The world’s most essential psychedelic rock experience should defy rational explanation and scholarly deconstruction. No tablature can define for you what these latter day cosmic couriers bring to the table, no lyric sheet will give you access to their text; you put the music on, close your eyes, and dream your equivalent of the pond into existence. Bardo Pond has the outward specifications of a rock band — guitars, bass, keyboards, drums, occasional but crucial flute and violin and vocals — but the rivers that converge into the band’s oneiric flow have their headwaters in the outlands of ecstatic jazz, free noise and the avant-garde. Their slow-motion avalanches of churning instrumentation and voice suggest drugged states but don’t necessarily require them.”
Over 41 minutes The Pond’s fermentation, their languid throb and textured groove (flute, violin, Isobel Sollenberger’s haunting vocals) sounds like cathartic dream pop wrapped in a delicately constructed barbwire shroud.
“One of underground rock’s most extraordinary enigmas” The Quietus.
“Zonked space-rock, crackling guitars and perma-blitzed vocals comprise their dogged drone-zone dispatches” The Independent.
““Crossover” (albums opening track) matches sludgy Dinosaur Jr. guitar power with the glacial grandiosity of Black Mountain, as if Isobel Sollenberger is conjuring a thunderstorm with the sound of her voice and riding it across the heavens” Stereogum.