9

Description

In the world of Pond, nothing stays still for long. After the thrilling psychedelic pop album Tasmania in 2019, the Australian band wanted to try a more spontaneous way of working for their next album. Drawing inspiration from Can's book on the outlier values of krautrock, Pond embarked on a series of completely improvised jams from which songs and ideas could be extracted. Given the pace at which ideas rush through your mind, the listening experience promises to be dizzying. Opening with "Song For Agnes," it bursts from the speakers like an intergalactic rock opera in the form of a composite virtual fist of bubbling synth pop, 80s hair metal, and ecstatic saxophone that hits you squarely in the head before you even see it coming. It's a most fitting curtain-raiser for an album that can encompass techno thumping with "Human Touch," elastic-hipped robotic funk with "America's Cup," hallucinatory motorik with "Czech Locomotive," and so much more without even taking a breath. Thus, the single "Pink Lunettes" starts as if ESG had launched into an eight-hour session at Berghain before taking off aboard a gargantuan synth and disappearing on the horizon. Even in terms of lyrics, 9 takes Pond into unknown territory. Nick Allbrook's songs (former guitarist, keyboardist, and bassist of Tame Impala) take on a more impressionistic turn than before, resulting in both hilarious one-liners in the gonzo thrash of "Human Touch" and social and environmental concerns in the closing track "Toast," which addresses both the bushfires of 2020 and the horrifying wealth gap in his childhood town. Above all, 9 offers a sense of creative abandon and simply fun. If it was only half as enjoyable to make as it is to listen to, then they must have had a blast!