New Music Reviews
Pond - Man It Feels Like Space Again by Cyrus Deloye
Whenever I recommend Pond to my friends, I invariably find myself with the slippery task of explaining how this group is different from Tame Impala. In every practical sense, Pond = Live Tame Impala - Kevin Parker. So what does Pond leave us with? Let’s talk about their latest release, Man It Feels Like Space Again. The first track begins with a minute-long introduction featuring synths that sound like violins being played in the radioactive light of a UFO’s tractor beam and vocals that were left out in the sun to bake, desperate and thirsty. This melodramatic beginning sets a goofy tone that the rest of the album actually embraces. With track titles like “Heroic Shart” and “Medicine Hat,” it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to guess what these songs might sound like before listening. Unfortunately, these might be the two weakest songs on the album. In “Heroic Shart,” the endless fuzz is overbearing, and it obscures anything interesting about the structure of the song. To be sure, there isn’t much going on structurally in the first place. My mind conjures images of stomping through a decrepit graveyard on mind-numbing painkillers, haunted by mutant killer squirrels and stifled by filthy air. I might also suggest that “Shart” is a lazy knock-off of Halcyon Digest-era Deerhunter. “Medicine Hat” itself isn’t so bad, but it’s slow and they throw it at the end of the album, leaving the listener in a more subdued state than a Pond album should. I will admit, however, that arguably the best two minutes of music appears in the final song on the album, between 3:15 and 5:30 minutes. If you listen to this section of the title track and stare at the album cover, you will gather a sense of cohesion that might not have been apparent before. In much the same way Tame Impala does, Pond recalls a 1960s consciousness of the corporate-industrial complex taking over, and they are just trying to add a bit of color to your end-of-the-world get-together. Fortunately, the over-the-topness of this record seems to temper the balance between form and message. Perhaps Pond has discovered what is fundamentally goofy about psychedelic rock, and they are now working to perfect it. In any case, they seem to be very self-aware of how they go about their business. Don’t bother sending them your complaints.
Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again
by Jackson Hudgins Jessica Pratt writes nimble, circular songs that are probably as good as any that will ever be released in this vein. Not to be unrealistically hyperbolic, but she is Karen Dalton good and writes her own songs. It is music for the windows and fire escapes of brick buildings that look onto alleyways. It’s also winter music in general. The recordings are intimate. Tape hiss pervades. Comparisons to late ‘60s female folk singers are unavoidable. Slight turns of phrase and little idiosyncratic pronunciations writhe around in your head until you’re saying can’t like “ke-ynt” in a hushed, high pitched voice over and over while you eat dinner alone. Pratt possesses the melodic experimentalism of Joanna Newsom (which is to say the melodic experimentalism of Van Dyke Parks) but shuns theatricality in favor of a soulful naturalism that invokes Karen Dalton and Joan Baez, among the others. Her vocal range is astounding and almost comical if deployed all at once. The truth is that she has access to a very special American something; something you only hear in the music of someone like John Fahey or Randy Newman (although Robert Wyatt has it?). It’s a synthesis, a refraction of history, and it’s also a very specific feeling. Listen to “Poor Boy A Long Way From Home” by Fahey and then “I’ve Got A Feeling” off of this album and you will know what I mean. Anyway, if that seems insular, what I mean to say is that people will be listening to this album for the next 50 years and it will always sound like what it sounds like right now: inevitable, timeless, peculiar.
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