Man It Feels Like Space Again Album Cover Artist
A few months ago, I praised the ongoing psych-pop revival currently happening in Australia – bands in all the major metropolises (and numerous small towns) playing the sort of wonky, experimental, fuzzy, sparkling, multi-faceted, stoner stone music then love of early Pink Floyd, 70s Todd Rundgren and fifty-fifty the assurance-out boogie of Australian pioneers Coloured Assurance.
I honed in on three bands, mainly: Brisbane'south summery John Steel Singers, the woozy rhythms of Blank Realm and the monstrous popular groove of Tame Impala.
I omitted to mention the fantastic fun-speckled splendour and collective vision of Swimming, withal – a grievous oversight every bit Pond are front, left and centre of the Australian psych-popular scene, as the gluttonous sprawl of their sixth studio album, Human it Feels Like Space Again, proves.
The anthology was recorded over several months in a small studio in Collingwood, Melbourne – where several band members slept crude – and it sounds like it. Not in a bad way, just in the sense of freedom that permeates songs such equally the fantastically tricky space rock opener, Waiting Around For Grace, a scrap similar the Flaming Lips back in the mid-90s, before they became irritating.
Or Tame Impala themselves.
Indeed, the ii bands are so entwined that sometimes Pond are downgraded as a Tame Impala offshoot. That'south not quite fair: if anything, information technology's the other way round. Not only exercise the bands share a audio and a city (Perth), they also share members – when Nick Allbrook left Tame Impala a couple of years back to concentrate on Swimming and other projects, he was replaced by another member of Pond. (There'due south only one member of Tame Impala who hasn't been in Pond.)
The truth of the affair though is that the 2 bands are distinct entities. Cadre member Joseph Ryan explained the differences to UK publication The Stool Pigeon thus: "Kevin [Parker, Tame Impala frontman] writes pretty much all the Tame songs. Jay [Watson], Nick and I write all the Pond songs. Kevin likes to get everyone in Tame playing the correct riffs and chords whereas Pond are [far looser]... Kevin has long, straight hair and I have a white-boy 'fro. To my ears, Tame and Pond sound completely different."
Information technology'due south tempting to think of Swimming as the more than unruly, dorky, incestuous lovers of Tame Impala – not for them their concerns virtually striking the same note twice or strait-jacketing their songs into recognisable structures. And while the master single Elvis' Flaming Star may share much of the aforementioned, wonderfully intoxicating 70s-era glam stomp as Elephant (think Marc Bolan transported to a futuristic world populated by D'Angelo fans), elsewhere it's non so straightforward.
Explosions, unearthly audio effects, trippy percussion and quintuple-tracked vocals populate the album. The synths on the championship track fizzle and oomph like a less together MGMT before setting off in another direction altogether. Sitting Up On Our Crane croons mournfully to itself like UK cult ring Television Personalities in their psych phase, or maybe John Lennon in 1 of his more indulgent moments (and there were plenty of those). Holding Out For You, meanwhile, is the sort of graceful slide through cloud-baiting childhood fantasyland and psychedelia that makes me all the same miss Mercury Rev so very much.
It'due south not all wonderment and wigged-out head trips, though. Sometimes the indulgence becomes besides overbearing, and you start wishing Pond would return to planet world, if merely for a moment. Zond is a bit of a downer, and Outside Is the Right Side is far too in thrall to George Clinton'south surreal funk band Parliament Funkadelic to bear repeated listens.
Medicine Hat too is worryingly direct – Ryan crooning nasally as the band play plodding state rock, a fiddling like Bob Dylan with the Band behind him. It's ok by itself, but one hopes this is a one-off aberration, not a future direction. Australia already has any number of bands that sound similar this, but merely one Pond.
That's fine though – you have to expect a lilliputian uneveness from such a deranged and schizo band. Indulgent and trippy and sometimes off-kilter – but a whole heap of fun. And they make marvellous spaced-out videos, as well.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/jan/23/pond-man-it-feels-like-space-again-indulgent-trippy-and-at-times-off-kilter
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