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Slow, meandering rivers and psychedelic rock bands can follow oddly similar paths in life. Both might start brackish, wild and full of potential. With time their materials may run deep and wide, cutting swaths of languid girth across the years as they reach the apotheoses of their wizened existences. But as the years drag further still, both entities can run the risk of cutting through their own sculpted banks, thus destroying their identities in a brackish dissolution of identity. This is where Bardo Pond are in life. The band seem no longer to have anything new or interesting to impart. What's more, they have abandoned the melodic ideas that so perfectly crystallised their spaced intentions on previous efforts. With Dilate, one track ambles into the next, with little to distinguish what is being, has been, or will be said. And when you've heard it all before, what reason is there to stick around to hear it again, rehashed and without half the enthusiasm or vigour of days past?

G. C. Weeks
June-July 2001

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