Pond - The Weather

Drowned In Sound 80

Lyrically, it's a broad, emotionally-led investigation into 'the state of things'. By no means, however, is it bogged down by the precise or the singular or the definitive. Within its lyrical muddlings, we might be able to tease of a forecast of things to come, or it might just be fooling us with a potent swirling of punchy psychedelic rock.

That's not to say that it stands completely distinct from the big, contorted, psych pop wagons that comprise the back-catalogue of the band from Perth. However, their full-bleed sound has been dialled down in favour of slinky production and distant - but crisper - vocals that sound more cool dive bar than surf spot. Nick Allbrook and his band (this one, not his other one, Tame Impala) take on a measured, if not slightly surrealist look the world through the microcosm of sunny Perth and is darker currents within it.

Allbrook has spoken in interviews about the subtext of the album. How it explores the not-one-thing-nor-the-other nature of Perth. It's not the most obvious concept that leaps out at you from this theatrical, textured album, but it's a compelling filter through which to listen to their fatalistic approach.

Their doom-forecasting is most overtly manifested in '300000 Megatons'. The political reverberations of the song signposted by its early release on the day America elected a President with an all-too-hawkish approach to nuclear weapons. As with much of The Weather, the track feels like a spiky, theatrical rendering of disaster, as opposed to a truly bleak one. It's very Douglas Adams its sound - bombastic, cathartic, tongue-in-cheek. It's the apocalypse you want to listen to.

This was followed by the less politically overt but just as compelling single 'Sweep Me Off My Feet', the video of which takes on all sorts of disparate images of cultural signifiers and heightened emotion, augmented and spliced together. The dreamy-weird synth pop track speaks sardonically about disappointment, and a strange whirling optimism. "I'm lonely but I'm here." It could be read as political or personal.

In 'Edge of the World pt. 1', a melodramatic organ-led opening that sounds just like impending doom gives way to a bristly, chewy core that uses the grandiose sounds of early science fiction. It's vaguely daft but never becomes laughable. If the album is a musing on location, they've clearly allowed for some off-planet stretch.

'Paint Me Silver' mixes the personal and the political again, oscillating between seemingly straightforward romantic yearning, and a plaintive description of "soldiers and the children still shivering in the jungle". The relationship between the two themes is ambiguous - something which underpins much of the album and might, essentially, be the point.

The video they released for this track thickens the plot further. The band are rendered as liquid mercury humanoids, as they shift their way from domestic living room to space ship settings. They are joined by a troupe of smaller lava-esque humanoid backing dancers. It's tempting to read in to this, but perhaps the most convincing reading is that it's just a daft illustration of an equally daft, but tantalisingly complex song within an album that pairs satire with sci-fi and apocalypse with lust.

'Zen Automaton' is where the collage of contradictions is most concentrated. Jazz samples and modern beats converge, with Allbrook's high-pitched, alien vocals becoming ever more taut and tense.

It's easy to try to read a lot into The Weather, especially given the band's overt actions to align it with various political sentiments. To interpret it as straight critique would be to do an injustice to the rich and - at times - playful nature of the music. The retro-futuristic sound that coats every song looks backward to the imagined sounds and textures of the future, and riffs on popular culture and captured news bites.

The Weather sits somewhere else then, an album inspired by dissatisfaction, full of truly curated songs that aren't all that serious about the scary stuff. So, both of our time, and out of it.

The Guardian 80

(Marathon Artists)

Few discussions about Perth outfit Pond are likely to pass without at least a nod to Kevin Parker’s Tame Impala. Not only have the two bands shared multiple members over the years, including Parker himself, but they’ve also evolved in what has seemed like musical parallel, with Pond providing a wilder, sun-scorched take on Parker’s poppy psych-rock. It’s unsurprising, then, that in the wake of Parker’s decision to largely ditch guitars for synthetic textures on 2015’s Currents, Pond have made a musical leap of their own, away from the 60s- and 70s-indebted sound of their earlier work and towards something more frilly-collared. Produced by Parker, their seventh album sees the band dabble in New Romanticism and the funk flexings of Prince. The result is a set of unashamed, swing-for-the-corners pop music – see the velour-smooth hit single Swept Me Off My Feet – tempered by some agreeably odd moments, such as the catatonic swirl of synths on apocalyptic opener 30,000 Megatons. Accessible but still absolutely out there, this is prog, but not as we know it.

Pitchfork 77

Because of the success that one-time Pond drummer Kevin Parker has had with his solo vehicle Tame Impala, it’s easy to mistake Pond for a spinoff act—especially since Pond’s music wasn’t released outside of Australia until their fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, in 2012. Parker has functioned as in-house mixing engineer since Pond’s 2009 debut Psychedelic Mango, while two of Pond’s three core members—Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson—have in turn served as touring members of Tame Impala.

The two bands share a penchant for grand, arena-sized music that carries the torch for 1970s classic rock. But where Parker is sedate onstage, Pond combine feral enthusiasm with goofy recklessness, their baroque suites draped in punkish basement-show charm. (Think Queen dressed up as the Replacements or vice-versa.) Pond also keeps threatening to release a record that rivals rock’s all-time classics—creatively if not commercially speaking—and their seventh album, The Weather, is a tantalizing attempt.

The Weather opens with a cloudy arpeggiated synth pattern that introduces leadoff track “30,000 Megatons”—an early signpost that points in the keyboard-heavy blue-eyed soul direction Parker pursued on 2015’s Currents. Halfway through the song, filtered robotic vocals tease that Pond is about to follow in the same footsteps, which proves to be especially true for the album’s first half. On numbers like “Sweep Me Off My Feet” and “Paint Me Silver”—both love songs drenched in falsetto and synths—it’s almost hard to tell the two albums apart.

Pond dips into parody on “Colder Than Ice,” with its cliché “c-c-c-cold as ice” chorus and a keyboard bass groove evoking Frankie Goes to Hollywood and countless other 1980s acts who made cheesy videos filled with artificial smoke. Ditto for “All I Want for Xmas (Is a Tascam 388),” which apes the iconic chorus of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s 1984 all-star famine-relief song “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Such campy detours are hardly surprising given that Pond’s work has mostly been about as serious as a spitball fight between junior high students just released from detention.

But The Weather is pervaded by a newfound sense of grimness. On “30,000 Megatons,” Allbrook sounds weary and disgusted with humanity, as he basically calls for someone to push the button and end it all, singing “I look out at the mirror/Look out at the world/30,000 megatons is just what we deserve.” On “Edge of the World, Pt 1,” he croons “We’re all just a waste of good meat/In a godless world” in a stagey falsetto.

Even the syrupy-sweet “Sweep Me Off My Feet” belies the sense of defeat at its core. When The Weather descends into vaudevillian strangeness during its second half, the contrast between words and music becomes especially fertile, as the band stays true to its zany spirit while showing that there's more going on below the surface. Throughout, Parker wisely employs his ear for fine-tuning while playing-up some of the band’s inherent roughness, like when the drums distort towards the end of “Edge of the World, Pt 1.” And on “A/B” (a remake of the band’s own “Elvis’ Flaming Star”), Pond establishes a missing link between Joe Jackson and early Funkadelic via a spazzy punk tempo that feels like it might derail at any second.

The Weather actually does derail—several times, in fact—but nothing can obscure its soaring moments. Rock bands have historically ended albums with songs that build gradually to gigantic climaxes—what Pond multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson once called “cosmic bollocks.” The Weather contains no less than four songs like that and even starts with one, as if Pond had epic moments to spare. For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness.