Roar, sprawl, obliterate

First snow of the year falling right now, just a dusting, sticking a little to dark green pine trees but not at all to roads and brown grass....

Meanwhile, I've got a review of Bardo Pond's latest up at Blurt. I like it a lot, though I have to differ with Michael Gibbons about exactly how minimal it is...

Peace On Venus
Bardo Pond
Label: Fire

BY JENNIFER KELLY

Bardo’s Michael Gibbons is calling Peace on Venus “a less is more statement in essence,” but don’t look for minimalism here. These tracks roar, sprawl and obliterate, in a hypnotic, heavy-booted march to enlightenment. Wall-sized guitar tones fray and blister into dissonance, drums pound in monolithic, relentless forward motion, and Isobel Sollenger’s voice floats over the roil and racket like a dream you had once as a child. Even more melodic entries like “Taste” have a palpable weight and density, their own field of gravity that pulls you in and keeps you there.

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I love this band.

Taste the sun

I ran ten miles today, not just without pain, but also one of those light-footed, bouncy "Is that eigth miles already?" runs. Which I attribute entirely to Bardo Pond and their ability to bend infinity back on itself and make it seem like no time at all. New album Peace On Venus out October 28th on Fire Records.

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.

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“Don’t Know About You”