Album of the day: Bardo Pond / Carlton Melton – Split EP

Lovingly pinched from Soundblab: I missed a chance to see Bardo Pond live recently and I’ve got to say listening to ‘Fallen’, their side of this split release with fellow psychedelic troubadours Carlton Melton, doesn’t help. An incredible, sprawling, 20-minute monolith that reaches those deep down, psychedelic regions that Jefferson Airplane just can’t reach anymore.

This is dense, disorientating music; thick with drones, fucked guitars, flutes (yep, flutes) and distant, spacey vocals from front woman Isobel Sollenberger. The vocals don’t appear until about 15 minutes into the track, so don’t go expecting any sort of recognisable song structure. Bardo Pond make roaming, immersive and trance-inducing pieces that could quite happily go on for hours. It’s an intense and all-consuming ride through the noise-rock underground and one I can’t recommend enough.

As Bardo Pond’s track gradually subsides it’s followed by the equally epic Carlton Melton piece, ‘Slow Growth’. The track fades in with slowly building electronics and a dusty, wind-swept drone; the title couldn’t be more apt. At once soothing and mildly unnerving, Carlton Melton make music for your mind. It’s around the five-minute mark that crunching, doom-rock indebted guitars come in, perfectly balanced with the rather pretty instrumentation now going on in the background. If I were to draw comparisons I’d say there’s something of the Vibracathedral Orchestra’s hypnotic, circling majesty in ‘Slow Growth’.

Continue reading: Bardo Pond/Carlton Melton – Split EP – Review – Soundblab.

Tags: Agitated Records, Album of the day, Andy Brown, bardo pond, Bardo Pond / Carlton Melton, Carlton Melton, Isobel Sollenberger, Krautrock, psychedelica, Soundblab

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 6:18 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.