Comes with a Smile # webexclusives
issues | the songs | interviews | reviews | images | web exclusives | top 10 | history | search
search

April 2006 / October 2005 / February-April 2005 / November-December 2004 / July 2004 / March-April 2004 / November-December 2003 / June-July 2003 / March-April 2003 / January-February 2003 / December 2002 / November 2002 / August 2002 / May-June 2002 / November 2001 / October 2001 / June-July 2001 / all web exclusives / search

Bardo Pond | Dilate (Matador)
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

back