Pond ______________
Ten years into their career, and Pond continue to purvey prog psych pop of the highest calibre. From their ties to Tame Impala to their love of classic prog – “funny goblin-y lyrics” and all – Prog gets immersed in the Aussies’ kaleidoscopic world…
Western Australians adding a splash of psychedelic colour to their sound.
“I was mad keen on
Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Yes. I like prog records
that have some emotion in them, like
Close To The Edge.”
Pond refuse to let the grass grow under their feet. Since forming as a loose collective just over a decade ago, the band have released eight albums of wildly diverse wonderment, a constant flux of psychedelia, space rock, prog, pop art and avant-funk. It’s a prolific run that’s all the more impressive given that Pond’s core duo have also spent much of that time as touring members of fellow Australians Tame Impala, as well as squeezing in solo and side-projects.
“It’s just the Pond mindset,” says chief songwriter Nick Allbrook of the band’s work ethic. “It feels like we must write and create music now. I get pretty stressed out if stuff isn’t flowing or coming out, so it’s a necessary thing. We’re always trying to develop what we’re doing.”
Their latest arrival is Tasmania, a mostly electronic collision of prog and pop, crackling with weird studio effects, fat drum machines and spacey ambience. It’s very much a continuation of the textures explored on its 2017 predecessor, The Weather, which found the band (Allbrook, Jay Watson, Joe Ryan, Jamie Terry and James Ireland) largely dispensing with guitars in favour of synths.
“It just felt like we had more of that to get out,” Allbrook explains. “It was like we hadn’t even finished making The Weather, so we wanted to keep going. I was listening to things like Madonna’s Ray Of Light, stuff with quite far-out electronic production, but adapted to a pop medium. Björk does that kind of thing really well, too, with techno/house bass. There’s nothing more blatantly euphoric and wide-eyed, hands-in-the-air than that sort of thing – thumping four-to-thefloor beats and soaring melodies. I love that feeling when music goes for that.”
All this might suggest that
Tasmania sounds like some kind of clubby rave-up, but that’s only part of the equation.
Factor in Pond’s long-held debt to classic prog and the groundbreaking German bands of the 70s and you’ll have more of an idea of just where the album is coming from.
“When I was younger,
I was mad keen on Jethro Tull, King Crimson and Yes,” says Allbrook. “I like prog records that have some emotion in them, like [Yes’] Close To The Edge. That has all the stereotype hallmarks of prog – the high voice, the funny goblin-y lyrics and stuff like that – but they still really feel it. It’s so beautiful and organic. When Pond first started, we were really into classic psych rock. Led Zeppelin and Cream have sort of faded away in our minds now, but Can, Harmonia and Faust are still just as revelatory as when we first heard them. That music ebbs and flows, it’s endlessly inspiring. So we were listening to it again going into making this album. It always has an effect.”
Pond hail from Perth in Western Australia. Formed in 2008 around the nucleus of Allbrook, Watson and Ryan, the band’s debut Psychedelic Mango was recorded in Nick’s parents’ house and issued in a limited run early the following year. By the time they got to album number three, 2010’s Frond, multiinstrumentalists Watson and Allbrook were already key components of good friend Kevin Parker’s live set-up as Tame Impala. Watson even played some guitar and drums on that year’s Innerspeaker, Parker’s first studio effort under the Tame Impala banner.
Pond cast off the last vestiges of their early reputation with 2015’s Man It Feels Like Space Again. It was a glorious pop art statement about the commodification of psychedelia, from its space opera ballads right down to its 60s comic strip sleeve. This, in turn, seemed to clear the ground for its synth-centric follow-up, The Weather.
The change wasn’t merely a stylistic one. Allbrook dug deeper than before on a lyrical level, fashioning a concept album, ostensibly to do with Perth, that spoke of wider issues concerning national identity and the legacy of empire. Or, as he puts it, “laying out all the dark things underneath the shimmering exterior of cranes, development, money and white privilege.”
The same themes also provide the fuel for Tasmania. As the son of historians who studied colonialism and Aboriginal culture, Allbrook is only too aware of the contradictions at the heart of Australian society, especially the treatment of its indigenous population over the past two centuries.
“I grew up in the Kimberley area of Western Australia, which is the far north west,” he explains. “I was, and still am, really close to Aboriginal cultures of that area. I guess it means a lot more when it’s not an intellectual, theoretical outrage at something, it’s actually personal. It’s your friends and family.”
What Allbrook calls this “deep personal sadness” is at the heart of new songs like Shame and Burnt Out Star. “It’s this massive, looming thing over the sense of Australian national identity, or lack of,” he continues. “It’s like, ‘Who are we?’ We’re pretty much British people, but there’s still something that’s essentially Australian. And it’s tied really strongly to this awful, painful history of ours. I suppose that’s what we’re doing with this album, being a little less didactic than The Weather and sort of pointing fingers at other people, trying to recognise more of our own ignorance and powerlessness. And the fact that you are the face of the oppressor.”
Allbrook says that Perth plays a crucial role in Pond’s worldview, both on a cultural and geographical level. He sees it a city teeming with contradictions, one that likes to portray itself as a creative hub, while simultaneously acting as a seat of Australian capitalism. “Lyrically and thematically, there’s always things in our music that I don’t think anyone would get if they’re not either Australian or, specifically, from Perth,” he offers. “And maybe people from Perth don’t get it either. There’s a song on The Weather called Edge Of The World [Pts. 1 & 2], where we talk about watching the sun set over the ocean. It’s a beautiful sight to bear witness to every day. But it comes with a lot of guilt for us, in that benefactors of genocide can now live this privileged, sun-kissed life. I’ll never claim to know the solutions and it’s not my fucking job either. But the feeling’s deep and concerning.”
Pond’s music carries echoes of many others, from the aforementioned Yes, Harmonia and Can to late-60s Beach Boys, Berlin-era Bowie and The Flaming Lips. Yet Allbrook is conscious of maintaining a strong sense of location in his vocals. Just as Pond are the antithesis of a traditional rock band, their singer is atypical, too. “I don’t really want to be another dot point in the great tradition of aping the American rock’n’roll archetype accent,” he states. “There’s been quite enough of that already.”
As is the case with their last four albums, Tasmania is produced by Kevin Parker, who has an intuitive grasp of the Pond aesthetic.
It’s a bond that continues to stretch both ways, with synth player Watson still an integral part of the Tame Impala live experience, alongside ex-Pond member Cam Avery on bass. “Kevin’s been part of this tight family, this kind of brotherhood, right from the start,” Allbrook says. “It’s a bit like showing your work to your older brother.”
Allbrook himself quit Tame Impala, for whom he played guitar, bass and synth, in 2013. He admits that it was a difficult decision to make, but also something that he had to do for his own well-being. “I was younger and unable to take responsibility as a touring musician in a direct way,” he concedes. “It’s about doing your job well, keeping your health and mind in check, staying in contact with your family, keeping a sense of self together. At the time I wasn’t able to do that, so I needed to look for a more real escape. I needed to leave. If I’d been more mature, I could’ve just stopped pushing it so hard and started doing yoga every day, rather than getting on the piss every night. I was getting so paranoid about the idea that I was going to lose the ability to be a functioning member of society. I was conscious of this thing where rock stars talk about going on tour for six months of the year, then not knowing how to reconnect with your family when you get back home. I just thought that was an awful idea, so I quit and worked in a hospital for a while.”
Six years on, Allbrook appears to be a much wiser man. Pond are highly in demand as a live unit, of course, but he says that he’s far more relaxed on the road these days. “You just get better at it – year by year, tour by tour,” he says. “You learn to take care of yourself.
I think a lot of youth culture is distancing itself from the outdated nostalgia of the artist being sick and tortured and destructive. The further that stereotype goes towards the tomb, then the better off a lot of people will be.”
Tasmania is out now via Spinning Top. See www.pondband.net for more information.
“I don’t really want to be another dot point in the great tradition of aping the American rock’n’roll archetype accent. There’s been
quite enough of that already.”