Self-Titled Psychedelia

Bardo Pond return with their first album since 2006’s Ticket Crystals. The self-titled effort seems to be real mood music, the sounds coalescing the senses and producing a different response depending on how you feel at the time of listening.

This is one of the more easily accessible Bardo Pond albums to date, sounding less like a stringently controlled production than a live improvisational journey deep into the heart of the band.

At first listen, Bardo Pond sounds entirely random, a collection of odd riffs placed in no particular order behind dreamy, effortless lyrics with no correlation between the two. However, with more attention it becomes clear that they are more than just a band; they are a collective of machine-like proportions, each individual taking their place in a chain of necessary cogs in the production of a wonderfully psychedelic composition.

Bardo Pond takes the listener out of the real world, enveloping them in an entirely new environment, one more hazy and forgiving than they are used to. The band makes no compromises here, throwing everything they have into something that is too loose to be defined as post-rock, too passionate for comparisons to the likes of The Stooges.

The album is addictive to say the least. Once its nonsensical mantle is cracked, the listener finds it easy to scale the 21-minute beast of a track “Undone” as if it were a 3-minute pop sensation, but one soaked with pretentious meaning and a refreshing sense of non-conformity.