Release Date: Mar 1, 2019
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock
Record label: Interscope
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In a way, Pond 's eighth album acts like a sister to 2017's The Weather. Filled with the same dreamy orchestration, flirting with the end of all days and even mixed by Kevin Parker in the same studio, these ten songs make up an excellent addition to Pond 's extensive library of peculiar prog-rock. Lead single and album opener, "Daisy", puts the scope of living on this earth into a sun-soaked and nostalgic journey to Spring with a slow building of strings towards the funk-filled heart of the song.
Those Tame Impala comparisons should be finally washed away by this campy collection of psych-rock belters. This is a timely, record, too, given our current apocalyptic weather conditions What a timely release this is, given the current apocalyptic weather. The premise for Pond‘s latest album, ‘Tasmiania’, came about when lead singer Nick Albrook got chatting to an environmental scientist over some pints.
The world's in such a bad state that even psych-rockers are starting to get a little freaked out. "While the whole world melts, am I just meant to watch?" Nick Allbrook of Australian mind-melters Pond asks on "Sixteen Days," one of a few deceptively groovy tracks on the band's eighth album, Tasmania. Over the stretched-out glam of the title track, he promises with a wistful ache in his voice, "I might go and shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes/And paradise burns in Australia, who knows?" The band described their latest--which also marks their international major-label debut, on the perpetually alt-friendly Interscope--as a "sister album" to 2017's zonked-out The Weather, an album that Allbrook described to NME as "laying out all the dark things underneath the shimmering exterior of cranes, development, money and white privilege.
The Lowdown: In 2019, patriotism can come from some pretty strange places. Australian psychedelic rock wonders Pond have shown their pride by putting their home country at the center of their new album, Tasmania , named after the island state off the southeast coast. Pond's strength has been feeling comfortable experimenting and building off of their wide-ranging songs, which have incorporated varying rock and pop genres to create a truly idiosyncratic experience.
Pond's eighth full length studio collection Tasmania sets up camp within the beliefs of many, with, in this instance, an Australian focus: there are troubles in the world and this planet is teetering on the edge of colossal changes. The Mayan calendar, astrological pointers, melting ice caps and even the Bible suggest these changes are coming - too many references all converging into one point to be a coincidence, one would think. According to a conversation frontman Nick Allbrook had with an environmental science type, Tasmania will be the last remaining place in Australia before the continent becomes uninhabitable.
Smooth synthesizers and drum machines creep through your eardrums like the first sip of water in the morning. "It's spring and the cherry blossoms sprout," coos Nick Allbrook at the onset of melody, and you get the feeling that the newest Pond record is going to be their best. Just then a glam boom-clap rhythm enters and Allbrook starts in with major swagger: "Jimmy grabs a beer and we wash our hands in the creek/ talk is cheap!" It's the kind of song you'd hear at a party - the people closest to the speakers can't help but dance, and even those furthest away feel a radiating positivity.
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