BARDO POND: REFULGO (2014)
1) Die Easy; 2) Apple Eye; 3)
Dragonfly; 4) Blues Tune; 5) Trip Fuck; 6) Hummingbird Mountain; 7) New Drunks;
8) Affa; 9) Tests For New Swords; 10) Good Friday; 11) Jungle Tune; 12) Sangh
Seriatim.
Ninety minutes of Bardo Pond! That's just about
the right length for these guys, I'd think — the proper way to experience a
Bardo Pond song is to be bored silly with it for the first ten minutes, only to
find out that for the second ten
minutes of it your body has been disintegrated and your mind has melded with
the furniture. But even for a full-length album from the world's toughest pack
of volcanic psychedelic jammers, ninety minutes would be too much, and indeed, Refulgo is not a brand new Brado Pond
record, but rather a cleaned-up, remastered version of several of their
singles, EP-only tracks and rarities from circa 1994-96. Released, for the
pleasure of the truly delicate audiophile, exclusively on four sides of 140
gram Dutch vinyl — these guys take their vibes damn seriously, even if there is
nothing to prevent certain filthy sonic perverts from converting the vibes' sensual
beauty into soulless MP3.
In any case, whatever be the format or bitrate,
Refulgo still feels like a cohesive
album — back in 1994-96, Bardo Pond weren't exactly the epitome of diversity,
and these tracks, like Amanita or
any other masterpiece from that era, all sound the same way. If you are very careful, there does seem to emerge
some sort of evolutionary pattern, though: some of the earliest tracks have a
distinct blues sheen — ʽDie Easyʼ is a Bardo Pond-style variation on ʽIn My
Time Of Dyingʼ, and one of the tracks, for the lack of a better idea, is simply
called ʽBlues Tuneʼ. By the time we get to ʽTrip Fuckʼ and ʽNew Drunksʼ, however,
the band has already lost conscious touch with any influences and simply lets
itself gets carried away on waves of noise and hallucinatory images wherever
their subconscious takes them.
Offering newly worded descriptions for
individual tracks is impossible due to severe limitations on my verbal
abilities and power of imagination — better just check out my previous review
of Amanita once again — but I must repeat that a 20-minute length for
ʽSangh Seriatimʼ is completely justified, because listening to that song is
like being a participant in an accelerated terraforming process, where the
Gibbons brothers play Supernatural Building Team, transforming their guitars
into excavators, drills, and welding machines, and Isobel Sollenberger plays
the Mother Earth Spirit breathing life into creation. There's a magnificent
droning riff ruling over most of these 20 minutes, against which everything is
taking place, and once the psychedelics grab hold of you, time pretty much
ceases to exist anyway.
Although I am not usually in the mood of
handling out limitless thumbs up to series of albums that sound the same,
Bardo Pond circa 1994-96 were such an unstoppable force of alien nature that
just about everything they did in those years is equally treasurable (like Can
circa 1969-72), before they started running out of «natural» ideas and
shortening their records for no reason. Oh, and, for the record, ʽBlues Tuneʼ
pretty much sets up the blueprint for the entire career of that Black Mountain
band — big fat heavy stoner blues-rock with a nod to the 1970s, but revved up to
production heights of the 1990s and beyond.
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