Man It Feels Like Space Again
Pond’s sixth album is constantly soaring into the stratosphere and plummeting back to the ground, writes JODY MACGREGOR.
Prog rock is often pretty serious, pretty wanky, pretty likely to turn out to be an allegory for something embarrassing – maybe involving The Journey of the Anti-Hero.
But Pond have a knack for taking some of the best parts of prog – like the virtuosic flights of ecstasy and droning headfuck spirals of repetition – and bringing them back down to Earth. Their last album, Hobo Rocket, concentrated on the down-to-earth, a palate cleanser of rawer cuts before they returned to prog with Man It Feels Like Space Again, an album that’s constantly soaring into the stratosphere and then plummeting back to the ground. ?Waiting For Grace? starts out with a bunch of wobbly space noises, organ and hippie questions like ?Don’t it make you wonder how God found the time?? But then there’s a kerblammo rock riff like the one from ?Pump It Up? – the kind of dizzying rise and fall that’s repeated across the album. You’re floating off into the Pink Floyd cloud and then you’re tumbling back to ?My Sharona?-ville.
Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson, sharing and hot-desking most of the lead vocals, take different approaches. In ?Elvis’s Flaming Star? Allbrook goes glam, singing in a voice that took forever to place but which I eventually realised reminds me of Robert Forster in the moments when he’s at his most Bowie-ish. Halfway through the song everything drops away and goes out of tune, a fuzzy music-box minute in which he sings, ?Line up and colour-code your old LPs.?
?The simple bit followed by an ambitious interplanetary bit – that’s what Pond are all about.?
Watson takes lead on ?Sitting Up on Our Crane?, which opens with a programmed drumbeat that has the weird melancholy of a cheap keyboard preset, but soon the real drums kick in alongside spacey guitar that whooshes around and ?round your headphones as if it’s about to achieve orbit. Watson apparently used to sneak up onto cranes at building sites, looking down and thinking about death. ?Sitting Up on Our Crane? is like one of those Regurgitator songs where Quan Yeomans gets all philosophical and honest, whereas the last time a Pond song reminded me of Regurgitator – ?Leisure Pony? from Beard, Wives, Denim – it was one of their more straightforward (though still killer) rock-outs.
Approaching the end of the album Pond shake things up a little, first with a funk song called ?Outside Is the Right Side?. Sometimes you hear a song on kids? TV and think ?This is a jam!? and it’s a shame no one will know because you’re watching Blue’s Clues or Sesame Street and they’ll never believe you. That’s ?Outside Is the Right Side?, only you have to imagine the puppets and cartoon dogs getting busy yourself. After that there’s another genre shift for ?Medicine Hat?, which turns off the amps and most of the effects for something like the Traveling Wilburys at their most country. Joseph Ryan takes lead, impersonating Bob Dylan’s vocal quirks for a couple of minutes, and then it suddenly becomes a Pond song again, a kickass electric guitar solo and Clavinet seamlessly joining the acoustic strum and tambourine rattle.
The cycle of build-up and release, the simple bit followed by an ambitious interplanetary bit – that’s what Pond are all about. Sometimes there’s rough poetry to the hooky borrowings from rock’s rich tapestry, but it’s the context they’re in that makes them special – that there’s always another one of those moments coming where they’re going to eat all the drugs and kick the roof open and let an entire beautiful cosmos in.
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##?Man It Feels Like Space Again? comes out this Friday (Jan 23) on CD, vinyl and digital through EMI Australia. Pond are touring with Laneway Festival and doing the below sideshows in Melbourne and Sydney.
Tues, Feb 3 – The Corner, Melbourne, VIC [w/The Shabbab]
Thurs, Feb 5 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, NSW [w/Peter Bibby]