Bardo Pond: Under The Pines

BARDO POND: UNDER THE PINES (2017)

1) Crossover; 2) Out Of Reach; 3) My Eyes Out; 4) Moment To Moment; 5) Under The Pines; 6) Effigy.

You don't have to take my word for it, but does it look like these guys are getting... old? Or, at least, kind of mellowing out in their own Bardo Pond kind of way. After all, they are past their 25th year of functioning as a band; if anything, they should be having a mid-life crisis these days, or, at least, doing whatever it is one has to do when one's formula has essentially stayed the same for over twenty-five years and it's time to make yourself vulnerable to critical assaults. The good news is, most of these critics weren't exactly spending their last twenty years relistening to Ama­nita every night; the bad news is, most of them have zero interest picking up an old-fashioned psychedelic album by a band that still pleads allegiance to the Nineties.

My impression is colored by two observations. One, that even on the longest tracks of this overall short album Bardo Pond sound somewhat less dense and even more «shallow» than they used to. Two, that all the tracks except for the last one are completely dominated by Isobel Sollenberger's vocals (and, to a lesser extent, her flute playing) — she very rarely abandons her vocalizing, giving the whole thing a far more peaceful and meditative sheen than usual. Indeed, the very title suggests the idea of meditative relaxation deep in the forest, and somehow, the textures of the album largely agree with that idea. Distortion, feedback, reverb, sludge, heavy tones, multiple overdubs, everything that makes Bardo Pond sound like themselves is still here, but instead of the feeling of a psychedelic storm, this all helps create a feeling of psychedelic calm now. I guess it mostly has to do with their selection of tones now, and with the guitarists' careful avoidance of «sharp» chord changes and chaotic sound peaks.

In fact, if you strip some of these jams down to the bare essentials, what you might get is... a nice little folk-and-country record! There's a thin, but very well noticeable acoustic melody underlying ʽMoment To Momentʼ which is nothing if not straightahead country-pop — along the lines of, say, mid-Seventies Dylan of the Pat Garrett variety, or Willie Nelson, if you like. Do not be fooled by the distorted woman-tone of the guitar, or all the echo layers, or how shamanistic Isobel gets towards the end of the track, it's really just an old country piece here, psychedelized for those who still prefer listening to music under chemical influence. And then the title track actually be­gins with acoustic chords, before moving into the usual territory of cross-locking distorted guitars; and even then, Isobel's voice rises quite distinctly above the din rather than being buried in it — as if they actually wanted you to make out the words, about how she's so happy to be lying down under the pines and other meditative stuff.

The bottomline is that, even though Bardo Pond can live about as much time without sludgy dis­tortion and heavy sustain as the average human can live without oxygen, Under The Pines is still one of their mellowest offerings to date, and I guess it's kinda cool: it properly reflects their real moods and states of mind as they gradually age. They do not want to raise the ruckus and bring down the roof any longer, just to show their tiny handful of fans that they can still kick ass the same way they did it in the mid-Nineties. Instead, they use their old bag of tricks and their accu­mulated experience to create a subtly different atmosphere — and it is pretty much irrelevant how well you, the listener, can relate to that atmosphere, because it is unlikely that they are creating this music for anybody but themselves, really. Personally, I enjoyed the experience, and happily accept the fact that tomor­row I will forget that this record ever existed — but there's nothing whatsoever to blame the band for, as it remains more than adequate to itself.

Bardo Pond: Refulgo

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.

Bardo Pond: Peace On Venus

BARDO POND: PEACE ON VENUS (2013)

1) Kali Yuga Blues; 2) Taste; 3) Fir; 4) Chance; 5) Before The Moon.

«Anyone interested in the future of rock and roll should run out right now and listen to this al­bum», a hyper-excited David Maine tells us in his review of this album on PopMatters. The fu­ture of rock and roll? Just in case this information slipped through the cracks, these guys have been working on this same schtick for almost twenty frickin' years now — unless, of course, by «future» we mean «well-forgotten past». Naturally, this should not be taken as a nasty swig at the band: Bardo Pond are in a very well-defined line of business, and have every right to stay in that line until tinnitus gets the best of them. Nor is it any crime to get your first blast of Bardo Pond excitement from their ninth studio album rather than their first. But I do wonder whether review­ers in, say, 1990 were able to come up with excited judgements like «anyone interested in the future of rock and roll should run out right now and listen to AC/DC's The Razor's Edge!» — which, for that matter, was a really really good rock'n'roll record indeed.

Perhaps the future of rock'n'roll is in brevity: the one most unusual thing about Peace On Venus is that it is the shortest Bardo Pond LP released so far — 5 tracks, 39 minutes. As I said many times before, brevity usually works against these guys, since their voodoo needs time to brew in order to permeate your senses, and this album is no exception: it, too, lacks the truly epic gran­deur of an Amanita or a Dilate, leaving fewer chances for the evolution of initial skepticism into final mesmerism. Worse still, even though at the point of writing this review most memories of individual Bardo Pond highlights have already fled my mind, I feel quite certain that the band's gallery of musical images has not been significantly replenished with these five extra composi­tions. In fact, what with the band's experience and all, Peace On Venus sounds like it could have been composed and recorded in a single autopilot session, stretched over a couple of days at best. At any rate, it certainly does not sound like an album that had a proper 3-year gestation period.

The best tracks, this time, are arguably the shortest ones, where lady Isobel's flute and vocals are featured most prominently: ʽTasteʼ offers a good slice of Bardo Pond's trademark contrast be­tween the idyllic pastoral beauty on top and the deeply rumbling earth core at the bottom, where­as on ʽFirʼ the vocals are already directed high up in the sky, adding an «astral» dimension to the proceedings (so you could treat the crackling feedback as burning rocket fuel rather than streams of molten lava). Not a great deal of overdubs here, meaning it all sort of sounds like «Björk meets Crazy Horse» — which would have been one hell of a great meeting, come to think of it.

As for the longer tracks, their melodic qualities are fairly negligible — ʽKali Yuga Bluesʼ has Isobel murmuring instead of singing, ʽChanceʼ is completely instrumental, ʽBefore The Moonʼ only has a few traces of psychedelic vocal somnambulism, and all three are pinned to leaden, lethargic blues-rock riffs that keep predictably unfurling into guitar-effect-crazy explosions and then furling back to minimal states of existence, usually several times over the duration of one track. We've all heard that before, sometimes worse, often better; expecting any sort of «pro­gress» here is futile, and the only way to prefer this to Amanita would be by dismissing all music made prior to 2010 as «irrelevant» to the present day consumer (not that there aren't a lot of people who do behave that way).

I will refrain from a thumbs down this time, since ʽTasteʼ is really well done, and the short run­ning time, while it does prevent the album from «grand» status, also prevents it from becoming unbearable. But when the compositions start getting so predictable (and you have to remember that the underlying melodies are excruciatingly simple and derivative; it all depends on the force of the crescendos), it gets really hard to become excited about a record like this unless you really throw out every single memory of what preceded it — like David Maine apparently has.

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Bardo Pond: Bardo Pond

BARDO POND: BARDO POND (2010)

1) Just Once; 2) Don't Know About You; 3) Sleeping; 4) Undone; 5) Cracker Wrist; 6) The Stars Behind; 7) Wayne's Tune.

An eponymous album released late in an artist's career usually indicates some sort of «reboot», but in this case... actually, it isn't «eponymous»: judging by the album cover, it's «untit­led», so let us look for analogies with Led Zeppelin rather than the Beatles. But if Led Zeppelin were relea­sing their untitled album as an experiment, just to see if it'd sell fewer copies without the artist's name on it (and, of course, it didn't), with Bardo Pond, it is rather obvious that their devoted fan army is of a highly stable, yet utterly tiny nature, and it is probably futile to expect it to double just because some Bright Eyes fans might look at the sleeve picture and get the wrong idea.

In any case, Bardo Pond simply picks up from where Ticket Crystals left off — or, rather, «dragged off»; as usual, it is best appreciated if you forget everything you knew about Bardo Pond before listening to it. If at all possible, they seem even slower, dronier, more lethargic here than they used to: this is seventy minute of very draggy, very nerve-wrecking stoner rock. And un­fortunately, the more they seem determined to tighten the grip on the old formula, and squeeze any traces of compromising out of the system, the more boring it all eventually gets. At 21 minu­tes, ʽUndoneʼ is their longest opus so far after ʽAmenʼ, but seems to completely lack the «world-building» enthusiasm of its predecessor — its only interest is in testing the «backwards effect» on its lead guitar lines for about 12 minutes, before the predictable noisy build-up and explosion puts the track on the downward slope for the next 8 minutes.

One of the shorter tracks almost claims to «real song» status, but it isn't a particularly good song: ʽDon't Know About Youʼ sounds like standard fare alt-rock, drowning in sludge guitars, even if it is rendered some­what seductive by its memorable opening lines (Isobel's "Jesus is coming, but I'm willing to wait" isn't exactly on the level of "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine", but it is the first verbal line on a Bardo Pond song, in twenty years, that commands attention).

Of the rest, in between the heavy psychedelic boredom of ʽUndoneʼ and the light aethereal (ʽSlee­pingʼ) or swampy (ʽWayne's Tuneʼ) panoramas of acoustic / slide guitars and flutes, only one track stands out as a worthy addition to the catalog: ʽThe Stars Behindʼ has the good sense to present itself as a pompous, crashing anthem, played in waltz time and sung by Isobel as if it were some highlanders' drinking song, rearranged for a more courtly presentation. This is a fresh approach, fully deserving of receiving the standard Bardo Pond treatment (that is, with the Big Freakout Guitar Build-Up and all that goes with it). Unfortunately, its freshness is rather easy to overlook, seeing as how it is the next to last track on the album.

In short, a four-year break in regular album output might just as well never have happened — these guys are fantastically tenacious in clinging to their Vatican-size fanbase (a whoppin' two reviews for this 2010 album on Amazon just goes to show you who still really cares), and, if any­thing, you gotta have some admiration for this obstinacy. But at this point, they are in their «late period AC/DC» stage — doing the same thing that they used to on auto-pilot, generating second- and third-generation impressions that preserve the form but dissipate the spirit, with an occasional inspired exception every now and then.

Allegedly, it is possible that I have missed out on some fantastic experiences by neglecting the remainder of Bardo Pond's «semi-official» catalog: throughout the 2000s, the band has produced around 12-15 «fan-only» releases (as if anything else they do is not strictly «fan-oriented» as well) that usually contain lengthy improvised psycho jams, recorded before a live audience or in the studio (the first six, from 2000 to 2005, are simply entitled Vol. 1 ... 6, and from there on, sport individual titles). The few bits and pieces I've heard sound like Bardo Pond alright — should we really expect Duke Ellington? — but hardly as if they were saving their absolute best for improv time, so dip in at your own risk if your reverence towards this band exceeds mine.

I can only conclude here that Bardo Pond seem to have outlived their time — they are very much a «1990s» band, and had they simply faded away after Dilate, the world would not have become a lonelier place. But on the other hand, fifty years from now, time will compress itself, and those who come after us will probably look at this stuff from an entirely different angle — for them, the entire «Bardo Pond Collected Works» may simply be one large fifty-hour piece, split into several hundred sections like a set of preludes and fugues. Who knows?

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Bardo Pond: Ticket Crystals

BARDO POND: TICKET CRYSTALS (2006)

1) Destroying Angel; 2) Isle; 3) Lost Word; 4) Cry Baby Cry; 5) Fc II; 6) Moonshine; 7) Endurance; 8) Montana Sacra II.

Most of the reviews of this album that I have seen went the predictable way about it — preten­ding to forget about everything that Bardo Pond did since Amanita, and comparing it directly with their earliest records. Because this at least gives you an opportunity to fill the space up with something, e. g. «it is interesting to note that the heavy psychedelic guitars take a step back in or­der to make more room for Isobel Sollenberger's flute», even though the flute presence here is not really any more overwhelming than it was on their previous two records. But we do have to find progress in everything that we listen to, right?..

Well, forget it. The only thing there is on Ticket Crystals that constitutes a genuine surprise is a cover of the Beatles' ʽCry Baby Cryʼ — apparently, recorded for a John Lennon tribute album (commemorating the 25th anniversary of the murder) and placed here for fear of being wasted. It is actually quite a decent, minimalistic cover for the first three minutes: acoustic guitar, percus­sion, and vocals that are very loyal to the original phrasing and intonation. Then, once the main body is done, the number finally turns into real Bardo Pond, as waves of feedback finally hit the shore, and that which was pretty singing just a few moments ago is now blurred mumbling — «The Beatles according to Bardo Pond» indeed.

Everything else remains steadfast and true. The funereal atmosphere of Ellipse is lightened up a bit, rolled back to earlier standards: the acoustic chords and ambient flutes of ʽIsleʼ are a little melan­cholic, but «relaxing» rather than «depressing» (and feature unusually «clean» vocals from Isobel, so that not only can one finally decipher a few of the words she is singing — not that there is any need to — but also understand that getting in key is a really difficult job for her, even if she has a nice folksy soprano tone). The heavy fuzz-and-grumble is back with a vengeance on ʽDestroying Angelʼ and ʽFc IIʼ. And the band seems to have developed a real taste for backward vocals — ʽMoonshineʼ and ʽLost Wordʼ, in particular, play around with tape direction as if it were 1966 all over again.

That said, on any evaluation scale that takes Bardo Pond for a curve rather than straight line, Ticket Crystals is a bit of a disappointment. The heavy stuff is not nearly as heavy as it used to be, and the light stuff is not nearly as moody. It's not that they aren't doing anything «new», it's just that doing the «old» no longer seems to arm them with excitement. Some of these drones, particularly the closing ʽMontana Sacra IIʼ, already seem to confuse «atmosphere» with «sheer tedium». For the newly grown fan, unaware of Amanita, this can still be enchanting; but I see no reason for the seasoned veteran to award Ticket Crystals any more points than one would, for instance, award to the Rolling Stones' Black And Blue over Let It Bleed. Essentially, this is the sound of a mood-oriented band past its moody prime, tenaciously clinging to the old formula, but hardly deriving any further happiness from it — even for their own selves, let alone the listeners. Hence, I do hereby give the album a thumbs down, despite a Bardo Pond-perfect running length of seventy-seven minutes... wasted length, because the mind, already addicted to Amanita-level psychedelia, needs seriously stronger stuff than this to start reeling.

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Bardo Pond: On The Ellipse

BARDO POND: ON THE ELLIPSE (2003)

1) JD; 2) Every Man; 3) Dom's Lament; 4) Test; 5) Walking Clouds; 6) Night Of Frogs.

Six tracks? Even though the largest clocks in at 12:56, and the smallest is nearly seven minutes in length, that still brings us down to under an hour, and I still say, for a band like Bardo Pond, that's no good. We need at least twenty minutes to get on that boat, twenty more to pump our stomachs and be done with the seasickness, and then, just as you are finally ready to go with the flow... the journey's over. Psychobummer.

On the other hand, On The Ellipse may be just the kind of Bardo Pond album that we wouldn't want to go on forever, because this is where the band undergoes a shift of attitude. Suddenly, the psychedelic netherworld tones down its usual primordial soup bubbling, and out comes... soul. Or some psychedelic netherworld equivalent of soul, at least — the whole album is permeated with wailing, moaning, groaning, sighing, and grumbling: this is definitely one unhappy soul out there, cloaking the lava surface of the planet in universal sorrow.

ʽJDʼ opens the proceedings with an almost minute-long flat wave of high-pitched feedback — just enough time to clear a couple square miles around from all living souls — before adding a morose acoustic rhythm and Isobel's never-changing ghost vocals. The formula itself remains fairly standard, right down to the gradual intensification of the sea of electric noise, but the way they use this «clean feedback» on the track is new to Bardo Pond's manner of thinking, and may produce a serious depressive-demolishing effect on the brain if allowed to go on for all of its seven minutes.

From there, the dirgey atmosphere only keeps deepening: ʽEvery Manʼ could almost just as well be recorded by the likes of the atmospheric doom metal band Agalloch, with its interchange of melancholic acoustics and minimalistic heavy riffage (plus a safety pillow of floating flutes), and ʽDom's Lamentʼ is built upon just one sad skeletal flute / guitar mantra that nevertheless has enough depth to somehow warrant seven minutes of repetition.

Of the remaining three tracks, ʽWalking Cloudsʼ is the only one to completely side away from heaviness and just work on the strength of multiple echoey acoustic and vocal overdubs — and yet, somehow, the whole thing never feels as «heavy», in the technical sense, as Amanita or any other classic BP album. It has a different kind of heaviness — a heavy darkness. Bardo Pond were never a particularly «fun» band, but it wasn't until Dilate's ʽTwo Planesʼ that they started experimenting with textures that would be targeted at the listener's emotional rather than physio­logical nerve centers, and apparently, they found the idea quite promising.

So here we are — a whole record of typical BP-style lethargic languidness, but this time dedica­ted to the ruins of their imaginary world, after a good old bombardment has wiped out most of the organic and inorganic activity. ʽNight Of Frogsʼ indeed (and the track opens with an appropriate­ly croaky wah-wah explosion). Is it a good thing? I am not sure — almost every track does have at least one interesting and resonant idea, but the construction mechanics, by now, is so utterly predictable (start out quiet, build up sea of noise, cool it down before the end) that I feel confused — if they are trying to pick at my soul now, why do it the same way they were picking away at my cerebral cortex before? Yes, overall, On The Ellipse has its moments, but I dare say that Bardo Pond were better when they were hot, and here, they are not just simply cold, they are in­tentionally locking themselves up in a freezer — and for what it's worth, Isobel Sollenberger is a respectable lady, but she ain't no Nico.

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Bardo Pond: Dilate

BARDO POND: DILATE (2001)

1) Two Planes; 2) Sunrise; 3) Inside; 4) Aphasia; 5) Favorite Uncle; 6) Swig; 7) Despite The Roar; 8) LB.; 9) Hum; 10) Ganges.

Course correction: as the tires hit the gravel on Set And Setting, somebody had enough sense to swerve the steering wheel back to where it belongs. Not only are we back to the proper running length (seventy minutes, just enough for the trip to be fruitful!), but the echoey, multi-layered production is also back, returning us to those intersecting seas of feedback that are Bardo Pond's prime reason for existence.

For starters, ʽTwo Planesʼ is probably the most atmospheric thing they have done since Amanita. The rhythm guitar / lead guitar / violin trio represents the ultimate in psychedelic chemistry — as the atonal, discordant violins tear into your brain like tiny scalpels, the chiming wah-wah lead phrase acts like some sort of pain-neutralizing mystical balm, while the chugging rhythm chords gradually gain in heaviness, culminating in a nightmarish acid rain — then dissipating back into the initial quiet. The whole thing has a somber autumnal mood and should probably best be heard on one of those gray, depressing days — better still if it happens to take place on a distant planet.

Another impressive example of the band's ever-increasing skill at building stuff up and then brin­ging it down is ʽInsideʼ — starts out as your average upbeat, rhythmic indie pop-rocker, with acoustic and electric guitars playing snippets of cuddly-cutesy melodies off each other for a few minutes before growing, slowly and gradually, into a psychonightmare. Technically, there is no­thing new here when you take it in context, but the contrast between the «innocent» beginnings and the hellish developments is even more radical than it used to be, and the tempo at which this is taken is also rather unusual for the band.

More questionable is the album's heavy dependence on quiet acoustic patterns — most of the songs incorporate acoustic rhythms, and some, alarmingly, never get beyond these rhythms (ʽFavorite Uncleʼ sounds like James Taylor on elephant tranquilizers; ʽSwigʼ is «formally» redee­med by incorporating raga elements, complete with tabla playing and all, but how many Western artists playing bits of Indian ragas have we already had to endure in these past fourty years?). As usual, Isobel is all over the place, and now that we have so many quiet, unplugged parts to sit through, it is very much a matter of how charmed you generally are by her vocalizations — per­sonally, I happen to think that Bardo Pond's neuro-stimulation could work more acutely if some of these songs concentrated exclusively on guitar string and electronic resonance.

Still, these are all minor problems compared to what happens when we get to the real heavy stuff: ʽLB.ʼ is built upon sludgy Sabbath-y riffs, while ʽGangesʼ flows on with such creaking and scree­ching pain that its eleven minutes are just enough to make you eco-conscious — the song's cla­shing guitar and violin lines are just about as dirty as the great river itself. No huge surprises from either of these tracks, but both of them manipulate the listener's brain just as effectively as any given highlight on any given B.P. album.

In short, minor twists and defects aside, the band returns to the tried and true, puts the cherry of ʽTwo Planesʼ on top, and earns its regular thumbs up for the atmospherics, the craftsmanship, and the dedication. Oh, and superb album art, too, quite in the grand old psychedelic tradition, but with a nice modern-day scientific twist.

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Bardo Pond: Set And Setting

BARDO POND: SET AND SETTING (1999)

1) Walking Stick Man; 2) This Time (So Fucked); 3) Datura; 4) Again; 5) Lull; 6) Cross Current; 7) Crawl Away; 8) #3.

Listen to all the Bardo Pond albums in a row and you will know more about chemical lore than you ever bothered to ask — in this case, for instance, I was not even aware that «set and setting» was an actual Timothy Leary term for the conditions of substance intake. Somewhere along the way the band lost Joe Culver («lapsed», eh?), and now the drums are handled by John Gibbons — no big deal: considering the essence of their sound, Bardo Pond could easily do without drums altogether and no one might even notice. Still, this is not a good omen, nor is their stubborn insis­tence on preserving the short run­ning length (49 minutes — what a shameful piddle).

The production seems to shift a bit from «interstellar» environments in the direction of your bed­room: ʽWalking Stick Manʼ is an 11 minute-long drone that puts the fuzz straight in your ears without burdening it with echoes, reverb, or any other «distancing» effects. It also seems to lack any sort of development — once the thing is established, one minute into the song, it just keeps going in circles, like a classic-period Aerosmith «sleaze riff» stuck in mid-note. Later on, ʽAgainʼ does the same thing grunge-style, with six and a half minutes of speedy nuclear fallout without intermissions or relaxations; and then ʽCrawl Awayʼ generates nine minutes of high-pitched feed­back that never move away from the initially set point. And, naturally, Isobel and her sleep-walk­ing mumbling are all over these and more.

The point, apparently, is not just to remind us that «Bardo Pond» and «allegedly meaningful mono­tonousness» are freely replaceable synonyms, but to prove this equation beyond any sort of reasonable doubt — fast-forward to any random spot on any of the longer tracks and you will hear the exact same thing. Some of the fans were actually worried over this, and I share the worry, because one of the major attractions of this band at its best was its subtle ability to build up the atmosphere, adding more and more layers to the sound until the rainy pitter-patter became a thun­derstorm. This subtlety is completely omitted here, most likely on purpose, just to see what hap­pens, but — at least for somebody who is not planning to use the album as a soundtrack for an actual trip — it might well be so that nothing will actually happen, period.

The most unusual track is ʽCross Currentʼ, which eschews the band's usual guitars for psyche­delic violins (the sludge guitars do come in later, so you could say at least one track has some de­velopment) — good enough for a change, not good enough as a classic Bardo Pond number, since they end up sounding like a slightly less aggressive Jimmy Page with a bow, and if you are fuck­ing up your violins, at least do that aggressively, so that you do not end up fucking them up for nothing. Speaking of fucking, the best track is probably ʽThis Time (So Fucked)ʼ, not because its title is so true to the album's content, but because it is built on one of those classic simple B.P. wah-wah pat­terns that rock the mind boat so well — and, of the short tracks, the two-minute in­terlude ʽLullʼ has a rockabye-baby beauty of its own (mmm, echoey slide guitars).

Nevertheless, as a whole, the album is a disappointment. It does not try to do «more» for the band, nor does it try to go someplace «different»: it tries to up the stakes on «minimalism», but instead, simply gives the appearance of being lazy. And even when you have Bufo Alvarius sitting on your right and Amanita sprouting on your left, this «setting» is a poor excuse for laziness. They used to get really high, and now they are just getting stoned. Thumbs down.

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Bardo Pond: Lapsed

BARDO POND: LAPSED (1997)

1) Tommy Gun Angel; 2) Pick My Brain; 3) Flux; 4) Anandamide; 5) Green Man; 6) Straw Dog; 7) Aldrin.

Fourty-seven minutes? You must be joking. A proper Bardo Pond album never lasts less than eight billion hours — fourty-seven minutes is not even long enough to overcome the initial bore­dom stage, let alone the ensuing unbearable hatred stage, the languid fatigue stage, the dizzy trance stage, and the total brain shutdown coma stage. And since, roughly approximated, all Bardo Pond albums always sound the same, the drastic reduction in length is more or less the main difference between Amanita and Lapsed — a difference that many will be able to tolerate and some will even welcome, but a difference that is not quite loyal to the band's essence.

Actually, there is one more catch: there is a bit too much sludge and noise here for my liking — for all their love of distortion, Bardo Pond are really at their best when they tone down the tide and rock you to unconsciousness with slow, echoey, transcendental-meditation-type patterns. On Lapsed, there is only one such number — ʽAldrinʼ comes in last and does the right thing for the longest time (14:19), with a single «delayed» bass line providing the foundation and subsequent layers of Isobel's somnambulant voice and psycho guitars slowly... very slowly transform it from a threatening rumble to all-out roar. The crescendo is handled perfectly: it is only once the peak level has been attained that the tune runs out of further things to say — it should have been cut off somewhere around the twelve minutes mark, I'd say, in an ʽI Want Youʼ-type manner, but then again, what do I really know about the regulations of modern day musical shamanism...

As for the other tracks, well, this time around we may perceive a little extra emphasis on distorted slide guitars — they enter the picture on track two, ʽPick My Brainʼ, in delightfully «poisonous» mode (think Allman Brothers who suddenly decided to do something in Black Sabbath style), and then reappear on ʽStraw Dogʼ where they are further overloaded with a wah-wah effect. Both of these slide patterns, as predictably repetitive as they are, work far more efficiently on my brain than the simpler, cruder Neil Young-ish sludge of ʽTommy Gun Angelʼ and ʽFluxʼ, or the deeply mixed space-rock ambience of ʽGreen Manʼ — see, these guys are really quite diverse, but some­how their «pseudo-roots-rock jamming» seems more interesting here than their psychedelic drones and sheer noise excursions.

Nevertheless, passing individual judgements on this stuff makes about as much sense as trying to memorize all fourteen minutes of ʽAldrinʼ and then hum them to your friends. You either hate Bardo Pond as an institution, or you respect them and own exactly one of their albums (in which case Lapsed, being so short, is not it), or you love them and then they can do no wrong — even if with music like this, they could have very easily pushed out fifteen LPs per year (like their some­what ideologically similar Japanese colleagues, Acid Mothers' Temple). Then again, with this «shortened» approach they might really be trying to tell us that they do care about each single second, and that the point is that you should engulf yourself in all the tiny intricacies — so par­don me in advance if I am in too much of a hustle-bustle here, missing all the expected epiphanies and the final enlightenment.

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Bardo Pond: Amanita

BARDO POND: AMANITA (1996)

1) Limerick; 2) Sentence; 3) Tantric Porno; 4) Wank; 5) The High Frequency; 6) Sometimes Words; 7) Yellow Tur­ban; 8) Rumination; 9) Be A Fish; 10) Tapir Song; 11) RM.

Regardless of whether the actual formula of Bufo Alvarius was a «winner» or a «crapfest», one thing is clear: whatever be, they shouldn't have changed it — this way, at the very least you can say that they «definitely got something», but suppose a shift from monotonous, half-improvised psychedelic jamming to standard-length pop songs took place? would they have survived it? what if nobody in the band had a knack for pop hooks? what if they'd only end up embarrassing them­selves? selling out for nothing?.. Nah, just ain't worth it.

So all the formal changes are strictly cosmetic. The album title now refers to mushrooms rather than toads (fortunately, there is still a huge generic stock of toxic organisms in store for the future — and remember, this is not an invitation to start munching on death caps); the tracks no longer include any half-hour incantations, spreading their moods more equally throughout the album (which does not mean a shorter running time, though); most importantly, production values have risen, with the band sounding a little more «clean» when they want to sound more clean, and with a better control on reverb, echo, and other effects.

In other words, Amanita is a minor technical improvement on Bufo Alvarius, and for quite a few of the fans, remains the definitive Bardo Pond statement. I have no idea — choosing one B.P. album over another requires unwrapping one too many cerebral DNA strands — but, obviously, this is anything but a letdown. The Bardos' formula is simple, does not pretend to much, and will not be loved by many, but they care about it, and sometimes it works even for me.

One thing that does not always agree well with these guys is noise and distortion. For my tastes, ʽLimerickʼ, opening the album in this scratchy/hoarse mode, should have fulfilled the quotas on distortion — for five minutes, they are capable of upholding a steady crescendo, with two guitar parts, the rhythm section, and Isobel's incomprehensible, echo-laden vocals gradually piled up on top of each other; later still, a third guitar enters the picture with high-pitched «ambient soloing» to announce the beginning of the completion of the circle. It is a hell of a disturbing introduction, but it already makes the second song, ʽSentenceʼ, seem rather anti-climactic — another ode to dis­tortion whose planning and execution seem like a mere shadow of their predecessor.

As before, Bardo Pond are really at their finest when they set up a dumb, behemothic hook — it always helps to have some solid Arbor Mundi tree-trunk to lean upon when drifting around in psychedelic haze. For instance, ʽWankʼ (yes, that is the title — self-irony? unbelievable!) has one of those reli­able riffs, shaped like the sonic wave from a skull drill, eating into your brain so ferociously that I found myself actually grappling my cranium at some point. When it's just noise, it never works so well — the brain circuits have to be irritated with subtlety, or they simply shut themselves down and the game is lost altogether.

But the major winner is probably ʽRuminationʼ, where the noise dissipates altogether and the entire song is dominated by echoing slide guitars — the kind of thing that Dave Gilmour proba­bly pionerred, yet here it is taken to one of the possible extremes. The first minute, with the rever­berating / wobbling bass intro chords, the shy acoustic guitar coyly joining in, and then the first airborne slide notes, has that simplistic, homebrewn, and still unfathomable mysticism to it that bad / generic bands are usually unable to conjure. Later on, the slide guitar will go crazy (watch out for it), but in the end, loyally obeying the formula, things will calm down again and get to where it all started to «let you down easy».

Only one track out of eleven has a relatively «song-ly» form — ʽBe A Fishʼ, not a particular highlight but still more than simply a generic alt-rock composition (at the very least, Isobel's mul­ti-tracked mantra of "I'd like to smell like a fish / When I go swimming in the soupy mix" is evo­cative, you'll have to admit that). Everything else represents either typical «Bardo Pond rock» (noisy, angry, stoned, super-slow) or, more rarely, «Bardo Pond balladry» (quiet, moody, stoned, super-slow — apart from ʽRuminationʼ, ʽTantric Pornoʼ also falls in that category), and further attempts at description are futile.

Thumbs up for raising the bar a little bit on perfection (something of the caliber of ʽRuminationʼ was still impossible on Bufo), but, naturally, do keep in mind that, according to my humble opi­nion, seventy minutes of this stuff are only listenable either in «background mode» (to what sort of activities — that one you will have to decide for yourself), or on one of those trips suggested by the album title. Serious intellectual analysis of the differences between ʽSentenceʼ, ʽYellow Tur­banʼ, and ʽTapir Songʼ should be reserved for neural scientists — or neuro patients.

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Bardo Pond: Bufo Alvarius, Amen 29:15

BARDO POND: BUFO ALVARIUS, AMEN 29:15 (1995)

1) Adhesive; 2) Back Porch; 3) On A Side Street; 4) Capillary River; 5) No Time To Waste; 6) Absence; 7) Vent; 8) Amen.

Philadelphia-based Bardo Pond do not write songs — they create ambience. That is the first thing one needs to un­derstand and acknowledge about them. Naturally, they are way, way far from the first band to use loud rock instrumentation to create ambience. Before them, there was stoner rock, and then there was shoegazing, and then there were Sonic Youth, and then there was Metal Machine Music, and then there was Faust, and then, and then... and then along came Jones, and the rest is never-ending history. Still, they did take noise-rock in a direction all their own, at least, as long as you are willing to accept that a Bardo Pond album has to be over seventy minutes long to be a true Bardo Pond album — and include no more than three or four well-discernible rhythmic phrases over the course of its duration.

Bufo Alvarius, the band's debut, satisfies these conditions. It is named after the psychoac­tive Co­lorado River toad (the second part of the title simply refers to the running length of the last track), and it does sound like whoever recorded it had previously spent some time cruising on 5-Me-O-DMT. Chief inhalers include brothers John and Michael Gibbons on space rock guitars (one of them is usually monotonously droning away on a riff, while the other one weaves sonic rings around); Clint Takeda on equally stoned bass; drummer Joe Culver, who, due to the songs' lethar­gic tempos, is the band's weakest link by definition; and Isobel Sollenberger on highly occasional flute and slightly more frequent vocals (although her «singing» is, in reality, at best just a modest sound effect, particularly since she, too, generally sounds stoned out of her mind).

All of this is very straightforward — you want psychedelia? you get its very essence, in pure mo­lecular form, no capsules or sweetening shit — and it is not so much «not for everyone» as it is «not for any time»: Bufo Alvarius does not work well as background music (because whatever you are doing to the sounds of it, you run a heavy risk of doing it backwards in a short time), nor, obviously, does it work if you are simply planning to «have a good time». However, it has the po­tential to carry you away into outer space if you feel like... well, like taking a trip that does not require any effort on your part whatsoever (like headbanging to Hawkwind's brand of space rock, for instance).

ʽAmenʼ, the huge half-hour drone that closes the album, is where they take this idea to its extreme. The actual length need not bother, since it can be turned off at any time (and the remainder of the album would still constitute a full-length LP, so it is possible to think of it as one enormous bonus track) — but if it happens to entrance you over the first five or six minutes, then the next twenty-four may well turn out to be blissful. The lead guitar weaves a distorted, buzzing / ringing / wah-wah-ing raga pattern throughout, while the rhythm guitar plays an echoey chiming pattern, and it is clearly the express purpose of the two to place you under hypnosis; worked in my case — at the very least, I got disfocused enough so as to forget where exactly it was that the lead guitar player started going in circles.

The «shorter» compositions are bookmarked by two not particularly effective slabs of grumbly noise-rock (ʽAdhesiveʼ and ʽVentʼ), but in between them there are actually some bits of stylistic variety — from the deep, heavy blues-riffage of ʽBack Porchʼ (which could have just as well be an influence on The Black Keys) to the retro-metal of ʽAbsenceʼ (which has the most memorable and almost Sabbath-worthy riff on the entire album) and the almost swamp-rock sound of ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ, with its distorted, sleazy slide guitar reminiscent of Led Zeppelin circa Physical Graffiti. (Not reminiscent enough to drag you out of the trance, though — once these guys place you into a fixed state, there is no going back, and even if ʽNo Time To Wasteʼ is just a tad faster than the rest of them, it hardly feels that way when the song remains in its context).

Overall, I believe I should have hated this album for the paucity of ideas and the bluntness of ap­proach — but it must have gotten to me through the sheer size of it. Remember, kids: one track like this on an album otherwise filled with catchy pop-rock is boring filler — a whole album of such tracks is a mind-melting experience. Probably the best thing about it is that the Gibbonses have such tasty combinations of guitar tones — such as a «mooing» distorted acid metal in one channel, and a high-pitched «astral» psycho siren in another: a combination that goes easier on my ears than many others (for instance, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and other newer bands prefer a combination of «buzz-noise» and «jangle» that is not nearly as effective on the senses unless it is shaped into a really strong melodic pattern).

On the other hand, it is also clear why Bardo Pond never transcended their cult status — they really have no interest in adhering to strict self-discipline. Even the five-minute «songs» on here are mood pieces and nothing more. This has its formal pluses — not only does this approach al­low you to record new material at extra speed, but it also helps you gain an «uncompromising» reputation and a small, but steady, ultra-loyal following. Its formal minuses are too obvious to be even worth mentioning — but not sufficient to prevent me from an enthusiastic thumbs up, pro­vided the word «enthusiastic» is compatible with this stuff in the first place: an «intoxicated» thumbs up might be a better way of putting it. Bring on the mushrooms — and don't forget the Colorado Ri­ver toad, of course.

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