STACK #123 Jan 2015

Waiting Around for Grace

It’s only track one and we’re traversing the galaxy in a clapped out cardboard cut-out space cruiser, avoiding bad trouble, but ensuring there’s plenty of the good kind on offer. Kooky keys, it’s shimmery in all the best places and bright spots. Elvis’ Flaming Star Southern rock of the stratospheres, this is fried chicken and beer for the soul; stompin’ and ready to fly, it’s a funked-up hop through a Presley solar system. Bring back Elvis, indeed! Heroic Shart A woozy, phased out, shimmering wobble that threatens to fall apart completely at times, but always manages to snake off in yet another fascinating direction. Hits full propulsion by the end. Man It Feels Like Space Again The album closer is a few songs in one: it begins as a vaguely Beatle-esque rummage around the basement, then sprouts out of the ground for some vaguely reflective, psychedelic whimsy and exploration. Dispensing with a vaguely Floydian sheen, it hits the straps and slows again once it hits the eight minute mark.

Given the ascension of Pond internationally, it’s little wonder Allbrook left his old band: Pond supported Arctic Monkeys on a sojourn through UK arenas in 2014, and played major festivals Primavera (Spain and Portugal) and Field Day (UK). All this after the NME called them ‘the hottest band in the world’, which is both a blessing and a curse. “The British music press is a fire-breathing chimera,” he remonstrates, breathing out more than just a little. “I didn’t even realise what was stressing me out so much, when we went back. I was feeling really nervous and scared. I didn’t want people to see me, I’d got that in my head that everyone had this sort of weird image of Pond as that. We all changed pretty quickly and, you know, I certainly am not the same person who was in that band who got awarded ‘the hottest new band’. Allbrook, while having grown up in Western Australia, isn’t a Perth native and thus a city boy; far from it. Allbrook grew up in Derby, in far flung North-West climes of WA, closer to the Timor Sea than the Indian Ocean; a scant and scabrous collection of streets inland from the ocean, where music was hard to come by. Allbrook grew up in a headspace of the far away places of Australia few in the world really know, and as he gets older,

despite his prolific work rate, he’s beginning to wonder what it all means. “I’ve lost that head-in-the-sand, balls-out-of your-fly-confidence,“ he admits. “I’m thinking more stupid old paranoid person things: you know, ‘what it means’. What is my point as a homo sapien? Should I be burrowing around naked in a forest? Or should I be helping the world? Or is the world not worth being helped? Have we cast ourselves into the fire already?” Don’t be fooled by Pond’s trippy visage and space-trawling vibe: they’re hard workers – see the six albums in seven years for starters. But maybe that’s a sign of the times – everything is faster, the media cycle amplified tenfold by social media, the globalisation of information, not just economies, cutting the 15 minutes of fame down to 15 seconds. Allbrook concurs. ”When the flow of thought gets to such a speed that the hurricane of information collapses in on itself, does it go to some sort of singularity? Or does it all just explode and scatter out again?”

Man It Feels Like Space Again by Pond is released January 23 via EMI/Universal. Pond play St Jerome’s Laneway Festival 2015: more at lanewayfestival.com

Does the cover of ‘Man it Feels Like Space Again’ look vaguely familiar? In 1968, Big Brother and the Holding Company (with one Janis Joplin on vocals) released the album Cheap Thrills .The band had posed naked in bed together for a cover, but it was rejected by their record company. The solution lay in the underground comic art of Robert Crumb (Joplin was an avid fan), whose graphic illustration went down in history as one of the greatest album covers ever designed. In Ben Montero’s 2015 homage that graces the cover of Man It Feels Like Space Again, hair, gurus and walking digits are replaced with space travellers, pollution, radiation, stargazers …and Elvis, of course.

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