The latest album by Bardo Pond is a corker. Many of the pieces on Ticket Crystals combine floaty and sparse playing with heavy concrete dirges. Mostly this formula pays off in spades and only rarely does the album lapse into mediocrity. Some great songs on this CD make the lesser ones seem worse than they really are, overall even mediocre Bardo Pond is still worth listening to.
“Destroying Angel” is an apt title for the cataclysmic opening track. Isobel Sollenberger and Christina Madonia’s dual vocals remind me of Neil Young filtered through a large dose of hallucinogens. Their voices sound sweet, but with the fuzzed out backing of guitar, drums and bass it somehow feels like the end of the world. When Sollenberger steps back from the mic and starts soloing on flute, the song really kicks off. To start an album with such an amazing song is unfortunate, as it is inevitable that subsequent songs will compare unfavorably to “Destroying Angel.”
The rest of the album doesn’t ever quite equal the fury and intensity of the first song, but that’s not to say the other songs aren’t good. Bardo Pond are masters of the slow burner, tracks like “Isle” and “FCII” which take a few minutes to really take off. When Bardo Pond get up to speed—though their pacing is always deliberate—it is impossible not to pay full attention. Even as I write this, I've got the album playing, and I keep drifting off during “FCII.” Once the different elements of the piece fall into place, the beautiful swirling guitars and violin play over a drum and bass groove that is heavensent and magical.
This brilliance is not sustained throughout, and there is the odd throwaway track like “Lost Word,” which feels underdeveloped. This is fine to be stuck in the middle of the album, but on repeated listens, I have felt the need to skip it. It could easily have been left off the album. “Moonshine” took a while for me to get used to, as for the first couple of minutes it resembles it veers rather close to the dreaded hippy drum circle jam, not my favorite musical mode. However, like a lot of the music on Ticket Crystals, once the band launch into heavy guitar drones and psychedelic bombast, the music blossoms.
Ticket Crystals may not be perfect but it has impressed me greatly. Bardo Pond have on this album, barring the odd exception, managed to combine fiery and blistering heaviness with an airy delicateness. I can see myself coming back to "Destroying Angel" regularly, any album that features a song like this is worth having and cherishing.
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