Bardo Pond – Melt Away (2024)

Review by Fred Thomas: Philadelphia psych rock mainstays Bardo Pond have a storage room of unreleased jams that's seemingly without end, as evidenced by the steady drip of archival releases the band has shared between albums of newer material. Melt Away is another collection of lesser-heard excursions into fuzz, repetition, and delay from the Bardo crew, this time a highlight reel of outtakes and rarities from their late-'90s run, including tracks from the same time as the comfortable, home-recorded sessions that produced the band's 1999 effort Set and Setting. That comfortable, familiar warmth is present on the wooly grooves of "Shadow Puppet," a song that sounds like Opal's happy nightmares being covered by Royal Trux on a heavy metal downer. The band wander through a spacier version of their signature feedback freakout on the cosmic roots rock of "Olive Skin" and "Tapir Dub" blurs together stony percussion with blurts of guitar noise and vocals that leak out in a Thom Yorke mumble. The ten tracks here feel a lot more like a fully conceived album than a cobbled-together collection of filler, and there's not a miss among them. Tracks like "The Trail" exemplify just how locked in Bardo Pond was at this point in their creative arc, with the band zoning out on a sinister riff that would turn into boring redundancy or bad grunge in the hands of a lesser band. The collection ends with "Highlands," a gentle but still uneasy track of pastoral fuzz that showcases the band's Neil Young influence and sets the entire album down in a way that fits the restlessness of the songs that came before it. Bardo Pond has more supplementary albums than even the busiest of their psychedelic peers, but Melt Away is one that stands out, and will be essential for anyone who already counts themselves as a fan. — AMG

Track List: 01 - Olive Skin 02 - Tapir Dub 03 - Son of Dispersion 04 - Anadamide (Complete) 05 - Shadow Puppet 06 - The Division of Nature 07 - The Trail 08 - Long Ride 09 - Despite the Roar 10 - Highlands

Media Report: Genre: post-rock, psychedelic rock Origin: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

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