9

Description

THE 9TH ALBUM FROM THE AUSTRALIAN PSYCHEDELIC BAND. A SONIC ADVENTURE MIXING WEIRD KRAUTROCK, INTERGALACTIC FUNK, FIERY SYNTH POP AND MORE! In the world of Pond, nothing stays still for long. After the pulsating psych-pop album Tasmania in 2019, the Australian band wanted to try a more spontaneous way of working for their next album. Taking inspiration from Can's book on Krautrock outliers, Pond embarked on a series of totally improvised jams from which songs and ideas could be extracted. Given the rate at which ideas flow through your head, listening promises to be dizzying. Opening track "Song For Agnes" escapes from the speakers, exploding them like an intergalactic rock opera in the form of a virtual composite fist of bubbling synth pop, 80s hair metal and ecstatic saxophone that hits you in the face before you even saw it coming. It's a most fitting curtain raiser for an album that can encompass techno hammering with "Human Touch", robotic funk with elastic hips with "America's Cup", hallucinated motorik with "Czech Locomotive" and so much more without even taking a breath. Thus, the single "Pink Lunettes" starts as if ESG had embarked on an eight-hour session at Berghain before taking off aboard a gargantuan synth and disappearing over the horizon. Even lyrically, '9' takes Pond into uncharted territory. Nick Allbrook's (former Tame Impala guitarist, keyboardist and bassist) songs take a more impressionistic turn here than before, resulting in both hilarious one-liners in the gonzo thrash of "Human Touch" and social and environmental concerns on "Toast," the closing track, which addresses both the 2020 bushfires and the appalling wealth gap in his childhood town. Above all, '9' offers a sense of creative abandon and pure fun. If it was even a fraction as enjoyable to make as it is to listen to, then they must have had a blast!