Nick Allbrook is a frontman greater than the sum of all his many inveterate rock and roll influences. You can sort of see them all though, at one point or another during a POND set: Mick Jagger’s jaunty marionette moves, Robert Plant’s coy gestures, David Bowie’s stridently soaring higher register. He even rocks a flute harder than Ian Anderson, as notes of Pink Floyd’s deepest Syd-Barrett-era cuts drift through the amps as if picked out of space by satellite.
All of this is in no way derivative: Pond has prolifically crafted studio albums building with great reverence upon the classic rock origins from whence they came. Touring in support of their recently dropped 9th – titled, simply, 9 – the Aussie psych-rockers made an appearance at Underground Arts last week and played to the warm reception of a room tightly packed with “ponderers.”
While their set was new-music-forward, with Pond spotlighting their latest more than any other record that evening, they seemed to have maintained focus on themes that have long characterized their work: the welfare of our planet and environment and a mixed outlook on the disquietingly dystopian future with which we’re faced, colored in tones of hope and dread. With Pond, it’s always all couched in the perspective afforded by lyrical juxtapositions of the little spinning rock we all share and call home, and the cold comfort afforded by Allbrook’s understated, poetic descriptions of the interstellar vastness through which we’re hurtling.
Review and Photography by: Joshua Pelta-Heller