Album Review: Pond Take You On A Trip To Tasmania

Pond has really done it with Tasmania by creating a psychedelic trip that feels personally celestial. If their last album, The Weather, felt like a reach for the sky, their new one feels like the sky reaching back. Imagine a cloud making a hand formation to pick up a soil, and you might understand how Pond’s kaleidoscope visions oddly feel grounded with their newest work. 

From “Burnt Out Star” to “Daisy,” I kept on thinking of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. While the record does carry some 70’s classic rock/ 80’s glam to it, I really thought of him as a concept. The idea of an alien crashing to earth for “Sixteen Days” to observe “Shame” or “Tasmania” ricochets throughout the record thanks to Nick Albrook’s voice. The feeling that you are outer space, itself,  falling into an earthly one derives from Albrook’s voice turning into the most playful aspect of this record; presenting songs such as, “The Boys Are Killing Me” and “Goodnight P.C.C,” like a cosmic being observing the lesser, earthbound experiences. 

If there is one thing every human being will do; it is to make their life feel bigger to themselves and others. Oddly enough, that is what psychedelia is all about. As Albrook skips, rolls, and skids verses like they are numbers in a hop-scotch game, every instrument in Tasmania becomes a psychotropic version of itself. They, literally, make melodies feel like things you pluck in Willy Wonka’s garden or that scene in a film when a regular parking lot become the cartoon version of Heaven. Somehow, the regular becomes the altered, colorful version of itself, and you love it because that is what music is all about: alterations. 

Music can be reflections, but Tasmania shows it could also be alterations your life. In choosing to make tracks such as, “Hand Mouth Dancer” and “Doctor’s In” to visionary tales backed by strings and synths that pixelate, Pond have made their most imaginative album. It is as if they cross the threshold of psychedelic to achieve something more. If “psychedelic experiences” are ignited by drugs and music, well, Tasmania makes you feel like a literal, music drug. Your skin becomes their arrangements and it is smoothed with Albrook’s voice. Buy Tasmania on  March 1 Click Here.