Pond - Man It Feels Like Space Again
- by Jim Harris Release Date:2015-01-26 Label: Modular
If you are from Australia, you hit it internationally and you claim to play psychedelic rock, you can pretty much put it in the World Bank that you are damn good. Pond is damn good, for the most part. Trippy keyboards, poppy layers of guitars, both electric and acoustic, carnival space-sounds, all weave in and out with echoey layers of vocals for some strong doses of modern psych-pop.
This form of psych doesn’t have its roots so much in the hard-driving electric guitar vein of, say, The Lovetones or The Morning After Girls, but more the lazy, breezy, pipe-smoking vein of MGMT meets 'Arnold Lane', as the pretty, long-haired girl in bell-bottoms holding her rope sandals balances her bare foot on a park bench and sings along. When they aren’t psych-tapping along merrily as in the opening track, ‘Waiting Around for Grace’, they are thickening things out a bit with the sort of dramatic tone that The Lovetones hit occasionally on such songs as ‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’ and ‘Sitting Up on Our Crane’.
Pond is from Perth, Australia, and three of the bandmates also play in another Perth band, Tame Impala. While the latter band is fairly well controlled and obviously centered around one voice, Kevin Parker, Pond is looser, less deliberate in execution, as several bandmates spread their songs across the 45 minutes here.
And Pond is filled with expert musicians who can easily blow a song into psychedelic directions with creative mixtures of Rundgren-style keyboards, clever reverb, spacey guitars, and those majestic sweet vocals that made Tommy James and the Shondells, The Beatles and the like so listenable back in the day.
The only real occasional struggle on a couple of songs, the title track included, is the wee bit too much repetitive jamming that fills the spaces. But Pond are excellent at what they do, if a tad bit excessive at times. Still, Man, It Feels Like Space Again fills the void for anyone who wishes Foxygen would do a whole album of complete songs or MGMT would settle into a better groove.
