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.
Check "Peace On Venus" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Peace On Venus" (MP3) on Amazon
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