New Bardo Pond

My first review of new material for the year is up today at Dusted, a consideration of Bardo Pond’s really quite impressive and beautiful self-titled CD…took them long enough to name one after themselves, don’t you think? Maybe they ran out of drug references?

Anyway, here’s a bit:
Bardo Pond’s single “Don’t Know About You” is a fair, though incomplete, introduction to this sprawling two-vinyl-disc recording, encapsulating the band’s essence without exploring any of its divergences. Except for the length -- relatively short at just under four and a half minutes --it gives a representative taste of the band’s swirl and dirge. Here are the obliteratingly heavy guitars twining around ethereal vocals, the two tones melding in an intoxicatingly off-centered way that makes you continually wonder if you are listening to the primary idea or being distracted by peripherals. And here are the spreading pools of organic sound that seep, like a thick liquid, across boundaries of meter, genre and key. There are drums, of course, bashing out ritually slow tempos, but the main sense is not of forward motion but of timelessness. The end of this song sounds much like the beginning; the middle like either end. It feels shapeless like the universe feels shapeless -- unbounded and curving back in on itself.

The rest


“Don’t Know About You”