Pond take us on a journey and a half at Koko

It's not all the time one catches a gig that blows your mind into tiny little pieces. Pond successfully accomplished this in armfuls with their awesome magnitude of sound.

One thing that really warms the soul, has got to be those bands that make you feel like you’ve been reborn, as if you’ve just made it back from some euphoric apocalyptic trip and you see the light and you really feel the need to tell everyone. There are also some bands that inspire me to describe how the music made me feel rather than endlessly compare it to other genre’s and musicians. Pond really do take you on a picturesque journey and I wanna give you a taste of that God damn it.

Imagine you’re kicking back amidst the clouds with a pineapple in hand with a straw, life is good, not a worry in the world; then suddenly you fall through the clouds, abruptly and you’ve lost your pineapple with the straw but you realise you’re flying! This confuses you a little but you come to see that you have huge wings (hence the flying).

 Soaring above all the bullshit down on earth you gaze through your pink tinted ‘John Lennon’s’ at the beauty of the world, passing by loud and powerful waterfalls. You almost get done over by a neighbouring plane, but you’re still alive as you lower to the ground.

Arriving on earth, you slide down a giant rainbow that has miraculously presented itself to you... you find yourself in a never-ending bountifully rich looking field and you’re out of your dreamland, but you’ve also entered the real existing dreamland.  Gazing up into the sky, you marvel at what you were just weaving through with your Pegasus wings, “ouch”, you feel something sharp pressing into your head,  fumbling with your hand in your locks you try to find what this thing is.... it’s the umbrella from your pineapple! Man maybe the drink was even a mango, who knows... maybe a ‘Psychedelic Mango’.

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So there we go, that’s the trip Pond’s music can have the tendency to take you on, no joke. I don’t think anyone can deny its marvellous power and ability to transport you to another land, a land in which you ‘let go’. Koko was a great venue for the Perth psychedelic prog rock group (two members from
Tame Impala), the sheer velocity and magnitude of their sound filled out perfectly into the three-tiered theatre. Stunning us all with an hour-long mind-blowing set, I cannot say a bad word about my first live Pond experience. Their music varies hugely, which is diverse and healthy and impressive. At any one time you can find yourself hearing early 70’s prog rock influences, then psych out jams, then downright funky hip gyrating vibes. Playing  songs mostly from their latest and fifth album ‘
Hobo Rocket’, the crowd were all insanely mesmerised by what was going on, especially when the full-bodied ‘
What Happened To The Million Head Collide’ and ‘
Giant Tortoise’ were played. The crescendos within Pond’s music are unbelievably intense and therefore ‘apocalyptic’ and ‘unearthly’; you’re then taken on a beautiful journey through heart-warming and at times melancholy numbers such as the new ‘
Colouring The Streets’ and ‘
Don’t Look At The Sun’. Another perfect addition to the set was a song that flowed into the infamous
Michael Jackson track ‘
Earth Song’. Not all noticed, but the ones that did, were a little bit more, reborn. Playing out their amazing set with the ballsy ‘
Midnight Mass (At The Market Street Payphone’, the ten minute long two tiered gateaux of a song, encompassed haunting head banging bassy licks as well as flowing into a cosmic ambient dream at the end. As
Joseph Ryan (guitar & backing vocals)said himself that night, “I was told London’s a tough crowd..... Bullshit!” He was right as the adorning fans waved their hands in the air and poured their love onto the five guys guys from sunny Australia. Might I add that having people play music they clearly truly love and are beyond passionate about, really feeds onto the crowd. Having a band that are down to earth and are happy to hang out with fans after, makes you love what they are about even more. We love Pond, that’s just how it is.

 10/10

Written by Jo Wells - http://www.cargocollective.com/JoWells

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