Reviews

Bardo Pond at Music Box

Bardo Pond

So funereal they make Black Sabbath’s eponymous title track seem sprightly and too stagnant to really atomise vacuums like Comets On Fire, they don’t haul you into their vortex as space-rock psychedelia should do, no matter what items of inebriation you have or haven’t been handling. 

Within the fair-sized and mixed crowd, a devoted dozen or so at the front mosh enthusiastically on the scant moments the music suggests it might lift its foot, instead of shuffling along like the pall-bearer at Jerry Garcia’s funeral. Nevertheless, they are received well, if a little, and perhaps appropriately, coolly.

There’s introspection, there’s psychedelic cool, but Bardo Pond haven’t the character, let alone the charisma to convince anyone other than the obsessed hardcore stoner fanatic or aging Grateful Dead acolyte that they’re anything other than spine-wilting soporific shoe-gazing.