2017 Year in Music: Bardo Pond - Under The Pines

Bardo Pond

Under The Pines

(buy from Fire UK; download or stream on Bandcamp; ok Spotify fine)

Longtime Philly psych vets Bardo Pond generally operate in primordial ingredients – brothers Gibbons' guitars scrape earth and sky, with occasional vocals and flute blowing in on the wind from frontwoman Isobel Sollenberger, all anchored by the wandering, trenchant rhythm section, shifting-yet-solid, a slow-motion tremor. Stoner rock doesn't sum up the parts; and "heavy" is too nice 'n pretty – Bardo Pond songs aren't born – rather, they seem to crawl up from ooze and just as often melt into the ether.

Under The Pines continues to distill their wall-of-sound in more concise fashion following 2013's similarly taut-yet-expansive Peace On Venus. The recording, done again homestyle, clarifies some of the murk, and places Sollenberger's vocals on near-equal footing with the guitars. A few heads rolled or roiled, I'm sure, but her mix of summoning squall and brooding chant operate here as an equal – so it's refreshing to hear that represented in the mix, not to mention the songs.

"Crossover" opens the record in classic Bardo Pond form – you fall right into a lead riff before going for a bit of a near-Zep turnaround. Sollenberger enters and all is well – this is classic rock for the psych set, guitars hard-panned and dueling in sprawling, painterly fashion. It's almost hard to believe you haven't heard this song before; though at a tidy five minutes, thirty seconds, it doesn't go on forever.

We get other Pond tropes, here, too – "Out Of Reach" is a slow, heavy dirge with a sparkling intro solo. The skies clear when Sollenberger enters, as guitars set to sparkle around the edges. The wordless chorus hints at the storm to come. Minutes pass, and guitars expand, rhythm section takes up more space unnoticed, like a glacier climbing down the mountain lip-first. Just when you expect them to wash away with the storm, they kick into double-time – a Hawkwind-ian or kraut-touch; or just masterly improv? Whatever. The Gibbons are set free here, and it all enters fog machine mode, an aural moss covering all ground, Sollenberger's chants occasionally piercing through the haze like mottled beams of light.

There are a couple miniatures – maybe excerpts from lengthy recordings? – "My Eyes Out" ends side A with a keening lead guitar that loops gaudily over a steady, forged-metal rhythm. The solo enters halfway through and they ride it into the clouds. "Under The Pines" is as close to scorched-earth blues as we get – a dark take on time or mortality, or maybe the upside-down version of folk standard "In The Pines". It's syrupy and stomping and slow, barometer rising, air thick.

"Moment To Moment" embraces a riff that's nearly from the front-porch, of a kin to Earth's take on country-doom (2008's The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull). Yet, with acoustic slide, it's bizarrely anthemic, it's crawling, muscular pace and near 10-minute length could qualify. We finally get Sollenberger's flute here, which floats in gauzily, but ends up carrying things across rippling sheets of guitar and torch-bearing, keening vocals.

"Effigy" provides an instrumental benediction to the record – and a welcome second flute appearance – a melancholy, tripped-out shuffle that's a counterpunch to the swagger of "Crossover". It's comfortable, richly textured, and conjures a wide vista of sound, that (I loathe to say) could even lure in a 'post-rock' fan or three. Somebody please pay these fine folks to score their film (did they do that before and I missed it? The price of an extensive discography). 

2017 Year in Music: Endless Boogie - Vibe Killer

Endless Boogie

Vibe Killer

(buy from No Quarter; download or stream on Bandcamp; ok Spotify fine)

For most bands – a single LP clocking in just north of 40 minutes would be a regular album. For Endless Boogie, that's reining it in; merely half the length of their previous outing, 2013's blues-choogle standard Long Island.

In the meantime, what's left of the rock establishment has disintegrated, passed on, or at best, aged ungracefully. What better time for Endless Boogie to grace our skulls with another fried pie of smoked boogie that wouldn't sound out of place on a Stones demo reel from 74?

...but then there's frontman Paul Major, erstwhile private press collector and ramshackle vocalist who'll make Tom Waits sound like Pavarotti. Major's voice, part Oscar the Grouch, part stentorian Western narrator, is up further in the mix this time around, and rather than playing second fiddle to lengthy jams, his non-sequitur, bizarre stories drive much of the record.

[photo by Shawn Brackbill]

On the first half, title track "Vibe Killer" roils along with interlocking guitars like "Marquee Moon" on 'ludes, casting Major's tough guy manifesto as lead amongst the hypnotic, looping guitar workout. A little nihilism goes a long way – this is 2017, and Major eventually points out, "Nobody remembers. No legacy." Even the solos feel succinct here (don't worry; they're not), occasionally peeling off into the ether, letting a little "I Wanna Be Your Dog" piano push the riff into the sea.

"Let It Be Unknown", at 3:45, is somehow the least single-worthy, a blues-y, wah-wah'd shuffle with Major playing his best creepy ingrate, spitting out the line "Give me a nickle / and I'll show you Don Rickels", which is just about funny enough to ruin the spell the guitars of Jesper Eklow, Matt Sweeney, and Major weave.

Things stay set to simmer on the A-side; even inclusive of the heaviest choogle on the record, the ne'er-do-well narrative of "High Drag, Hard Doin'" only lacks some found-sound broken bottles and Keef backing vox, and the vibrato solo lagging behind the already dragging beat is damn-near perfect, epitomizing the expansive sludge of Endless Boogie, replete with at least 3 fake-out endings where the soloist bends a note way further than he should, like a branch too green to snap.

On the B-side; the just desserts. If I write less, it's due to judicious headbanging. "Bishops at Large" cooks up a stew of background wah-wah and swampy piano – fetid and humid and richly redolent for Major to intone, "Bishops...at large" only to leave a pregnant pause long enough to imagine a scrappy fellow emerging up the hill of a graveled road, looking over his shoulder for the tell-tale sun-pierced haze of his pursuer. It all comes to a boil with Major's newfound "falsetto" – coated in distortion and down in the mix like a shorted-out CB, it achieves an effect similar to Lambchop's Kurt Wagner on Nixon's "Up With People". It sounds so good even though it removes all possibility of understanding what the hell he's saying. When it all drops out and the guitar riff percolates back in, you'll swear the Stones were reincarnated from that Some Girls plane crash.

On the back half, "Back in '74" is endless tasty biker riffs and velvety Rhodes that frame a (true?) story about Kiss. In case you were unsure, Kiss is fucking horrible – but rest assured this is probably the best song about them. The locked-in kraut of rhythm section Harry Druzd and Marc Razo is especially obvious here – the beat & bass all shiny like patent leather – and they modulate their volume so well for the quiet part of the story that you can almost see Major conducting the troops with a level palm. Would it were we'd all be so lucky to have a rhythm section as tastefully locked-in.

"Jefferson County" – minus the near-acoustic skronk of the opening – finds the Boogie at full-power, which makes sense given this'd be halfway into their typical running time. The intro fades into a three-chord jam that floats hazily over slow-cook drums. Major enter in media res, "And...ya keep it in a jar." He's at his best when he drops the listener into a years-long story that snakes forward like a river into a floodplain. The gradual pace suits the guitars best, as they find infinite permutations to rub shoulders with one another, only emerging from the morass to blessedly choogle for a brief moment before sinking back into the soil.

"Jefferson County" runs 11:42, but it feels like a minute or an hour, never in-between. High-level, molasses-paced hypnosis – if you can conjure it, you do. "Can you turn it on? Now...don't make no decisions now," Major utters to an invisible friend across the flames. Good for us, Endless Boogie still can, even if they've left the Herculean double-LP form to younger foes. Then again, trying to top your finest hour is a fool's errand – better to double-down on form, stoke the fire, and let the embers burn through.

Soft Landing

Hey there, it's been a little while. Ready for a brain-dump? These thoughts should probably all be their own post, but, well, I've given up coffee for nearly a year, and the cup I had this morning won't allow focused composition (either that, or my abilities have decomposed...).

(Precinct-level transit referendum results via UrbanIndy.)

• Americans are increasingly xenophobic due to development decisions made in previous decades. Most folks drive solo to work, drive solo home, and then exist in their castle or bubble, only interacting with a few people of choice. If Americans had to ride transit or walk through public plazas on a regular basis, we wouldn't so easily "otherize" huge segments of the population – Muslims, Latinos, the poor. So not only is suburbanization economically unfeasible, a driver of poor public health outcomes, and a development Ponzi scheme, but suburbanization = increased xenophobia. In the same way that traveling to diverse places widens your perspectives & engenders cultural understanding, so too does coexisting with a wider body of people. And this is coming from a natural introvert...
  
  Oh, hey – Indianapolis passed increased transit funding! Miracles do happen. The one good that came out of the last election cycle.

(Prins Thomas - Principe Del Norte)

• Electronic music is more diverse and exciting than rock-and-roll. I've been burnt out on almost all current rock-and-roll (except for a small slate of standard bearers from the 90s; which may invalidate my whole point) for more than a minute. But studio-engineered rock records lack almost all draw when they come from less-than-outstanding songwriters – few instrumental oeuvres and/or sound-fingerprints gel into je ne sais quoi – or, very rarely does the sum of the parts become greater than the ingredients. And, let's face it, most songwriters ain't that special. Have you read the lyrics to a recent Flaming Lips record? It'll make you junior high notebook look deep (though let's leave mine out of the equation).
  
  Electronic music, meanwhile, is incredibly wide open. From the near-operatic melancholy classicism of the latest Arca, to the brutal soundscapes of PAN releases, to the jazz/beat-set spanning the gamut on a single label from the brainy pop/soul of Karriem Riggins to the rigidly avant compositions of Deantoni Parks (and maybe I shouldn't even be lumping them into the open-armed barrel of electronica). Point being – electronic music retains better the ability to surprise and is more reliant on ideas and execution and often times (though not always) less dependent on 'songcraft'...whatever that is. I'd rather listen to a new electronic record I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate than the latest vanilla release from *cough*...you know who.
  
  Or – maybe my tastes are just calcifying and I'm not open-minded enough to understand 21st-century rock records. (I mean, c'mon, I just made & released one. On cassette. Shit!) Or maybe I just had my mind blown last night by a Prins Thomas record (though earlier in the same day, I was totally psyched and into the latest Bardo Pond).

(Get it? "Poor". They're not poor! They have phones & refrigerators!
The lack of empathy in this country is disgusting.)

• The Republican/evangelical white Christian (because, let's be honest – white folks, particularly Christian, are the only socio-ethnic group who voted majority for you-know-who) war-on-the-poor has crossed the line into absurd. Because you have a working refrigerator, you're no longer poor? Uhh...do you know any impoverished people? Work with them? All you need is a single (I know, anecdotal) interaction to know that being poor is far from a cakewalk. Just because we've sold our souls for cheap commercial goods doesn't mean that somehow the poor of 100 years ago were more noble, more hardworking, etc. Guess what? More of them also died in a gutter. Prayer is not a substitute for legislative action that drives and funds social safety nets. We're all a medical emergency away from bankruptcy...but, y'know, keep acting like 1950 is some kind of utopian fever (wet) dream.

Next time, let's keep the vibe more playful, okay? Here's a live boot for you to chew on. You can almost hear the snarl.