Pond, Perth’s beautiful silver-souled psych-rock outfit, absolutely cleaned up at The Triffid on Sunday (24 September), wrapping their three-week tour of new album ‘The Weather’ with a sonic thrust of melody, madness and marvellous mayhem.
After thanking Reef Prince and Sydney band Bodytype for supporting them on the tour Pond launched into ‘30,000 Megatons’, ‘The Weather’s opening track, an atomic shudder of a song expressing horror at the state of the world and our culture and imploring us that we press the button and destroy ourselves with the 30,000 megatons of nuclear weaponry we have created here on old, mother Earth.
I remember staring at lead singer Nick Allbrook with a smile as he curled his finger in the air and reddened in the face and felt reassured knowing that if he could, he would drop the bomb on us all.
From here they swung into the popular belter ‘Sweep Me Off My Feet’, lungs popped and voices cracked as the crowd joined in while Nick called up into the heavens for emotional rescue. The set was mixed with songs from all their albums, but shit got real rowdy when the ‘Giant Tortoise’ floated in. A colossal behemoth of a song from their album 'Hobo Rocket'.
Personally it's one of my favourites and I’ve seen them perform it at festivals, but this was a different experience entirely. Squished up tight and warm in the squelch of human sweat in The Triffid’s heat-packed plane hanger with elbows and limbs slotting into the most uncomfortable of crevices.
I shook my body and soul like an epileptic and was met with just as much fervour by my brothers and sisters in the pond of mosh. People collapsed into one another and howled out with insane eyes. In the middle of it all I had to keep zipping up my girlfriend's dress from behind as we were tossed about in the bodily swarm, such was the intensity the '...Tortoise' brings forth.
As they finished, Nick broke his reptilian and confrontational character and thanked everybody in the crowd, all their crew and supporting acts from the bottom of his heart for the epic tour.
They were of course called back for an encore, and after thanking the traditional custodians of the land they dove into ‘Man It Feels Like Space Again’, during which the supporting acts joined the band on stage for a boogie and sneaky crowd surf while Pond squeezed out their last droplets of musical juice for the tour.
It was an awesome show. Pond may be mad, strange and intense but there is no denying they are all amazing musicians who also have a capacity for tenderness and beauty and have achieved an epic synergy after years of devotion and hard work to their passion.
They are starting to become better known, but I still think they are underrated or maybe pigeonholed. They really are a world-class band and I believe they hold something really unique and liberating in their music and I can't wait to see them again.
I had the chance to talk with Nick after the show and he assured me that '30,000 Megatons' was written when he was going through a hard time, and he often feels like telling everyone after the song that he doesn't really want to kill us all... or so he says.
