Pond

The Weather MARATHON ARTISTS. CD/DL/LP

Eccentric and unpredictable seventh album from Aussie space cadets. Emerging from the same memberswapping psych rock gene-pool as Tame Impala, Perth’s Pond have been the crazed, freakfriendly cousin to their more successful friends. Leader Nick Allbrook may have ceased being a member of Tame Impala in 2013, but, as with 2015’s excellent Man It Feels Like Space Again, one-time Pond drummer Kevin Parker returns here as producer. The result is wilfully schizophrenic. Much of The Weather treads a remarkably similar, laserguided pop path as Tame Impala’s Currents, but for the main it’s bubbling with bonkers, proggy eccentricities. The likes of 30,000 Megatons’ nuclear Armageddonwelcoming bombast, the stuttering R&B mash-up Colder Than Ice and Allbrook’s frequent WTF?!? lyrical curveballs keep it impossible to second guess. Lord only knows what they put in the water down there, but it continues to produce wildly imaginative music.