Because of the success that one-time Pond drummer Kevin Parker has had with his solo vehicle Tame Impala, it’s easy to mistake Pond for a spinoff act—especially since Pond’s music wasn’t released outside of Australia until their fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, in 2012. Parker has functioned as in-house mixing engineer since Pond’s 2009 debut Psychedelic Mango, while two of Pond’s three core members—Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson—have in turn served as touring members of Tame Impala.
The two bands share a penchant for grand, arena-sized music that carries the torch for 1970s classic rock. But where Parker is sedate onstage, Pond combine feral enthusiasm with goofy recklessness, their baroque suites draped in punkish basement-show charm. (Think Queen dressed up as the Replacements or vice-versa.) Pond also keeps threatening to release a record that rivals rock’s all-time classics—creatively if not commercially speaking—and their seventh album, The Weather, is a tantalizing attempt.
The Weather opens with a cloudy arpeggiated synth pattern that introduces leadoff track “30,000 Megatons”—an early signpost that points in the keyboard-heavy blue-eyed soul direction Parker pursued on 2015’s Currents. Halfway through the song, filtered robotic vocals tease that Pond is about to follow in the same footsteps, which proves to be especially true for the album’s first half. On numbers like “Sweep Me Off My Feet” and “Paint Me Silver”—both love songs drenched in falsetto and synths—it’s almost hard to tell the two albums apart.
Pond dips into parody on “Colder Than Ice,” with its cliché “c-c-c-cold as ice” chorus and a keyboard bass groove evoking Frankie Goes to Hollywood and countless other 1980s acts who made cheesy videos filled with artificial smoke. Ditto for “All I Want for Xmas (Is a Tascam 388),” which apes the iconic chorus of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s 1984 all-star famine-relief song “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Such campy detours are hardly surprising given that Pond’s work has mostly been about as serious as a spitball fight between junior high students just released from detention.
But The Weather is pervaded by a newfound sense of grimness. On “30,000 Megatons,” Allbrook sounds weary and disgusted with humanity, as he basically calls for someone to push the button and end it all, singing “I look out at the mirror/Look out at the world/30,000 megatons is just what we deserve.” On “Edge of the World, Pt 1,” he croons “We’re all just a waste of good meat/In a godless world” in a stagey falsetto.
Even the syrupy-sweet “Sweep Me Off My Feet” belies the sense of defeat at its core. When The Weather descends into vaudevillian strangeness during its second half, the contrast between words and music becomes especially fertile, as the band stays true to its zany spirit while showing that there's more going on below the surface. Throughout, Parker wisely employs his ear for fine-tuning while playing-up some of the band’s inherent roughness, like when the drums distort towards the end of “Edge of the World, Pt 1.” And on “A/B” (a remake of the band’s own “Elvis’ Flaming Star”), Pond establishes a missing link between Joe Jackson and early Funkadelic via a spazzy punk tempo that feels like it might derail at any second.
The Weather actually does derail—several times, in fact—but nothing can obscure its soaring moments. Rock bands have historically ended albums with songs that build gradually to gigantic climaxes—what Pond multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson once called “cosmic bollocks.” The Weather contains no less than four songs like that and even starts with one, as if Pond had epic moments to spare. For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness.
