Pond: ‘It’s So Much More Precise’

Perth’s crusty cosmonauts are back with another madcap album, but Nick Allbrook says Pond are becoming “more considered and reined in.” Interview by DOUG WALLEN.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] By now we expect the curveballs waiting on every new Pond album. After 2012’s languidly scattershot breakout Beard, Wives, Denim and 2013’s more frenzied Hobo Rocket, the Perth ensemble of Nick Allbrook, Jay Watson, Joseph “Shiny Joe” Ryan, Cameron Avery and Jamie Terry continue to pillage classic rock for kaleidoscopic results on Man It Feels Like Space Again. While still much more fractured and goofy than their sister band Tame Impala, the new album feels more earnest than ever, even when Pond are couching the weepy melodies of a ballad like ‘Holding Out for You’ in a crusty lo-fi mystique.

The core trio of Allbrook, Watson and Ryan all released solo albums last year, but they still sound right at home juggling oddball ideas in Pond again. Electronic drums and synths sputter their way through Man It Feels Like Space Again, with ‘Outside Is the Right Side’ veering into noise-spattered funk tropes and ‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’ becoming almost ABBA-esque. It’s an album of tarnished gold, brandishing gleaming hooks only to muddy them the hell up. Still, as Allbrook notes during our interview, this is Pond’s version of stripping things back and stepping away from go-to disorientation tactics like the fuzz pedal. It may feel like space again, but the view is a bit clearer than usual.

I read that the album was born from a so-called “mountain of tape” and then worked on in a studio in Collingwood. So you had a lot of ideas in advance and then took it all to the studio to strip it back and find the album in it?
Yeah, yeah. We had a bunch of these songs – and a lot of them were done – that we had worked on individually or with other people quite sporadically, adding things and changing things and layering and snipping and editing. And then, exactly, we went into this studio and collated it all. And yes, stripping it back is definitely true. That was the best part of finding out where the album was: taking away all the junk that we had heaped on top of everything.

Can you give me an example of some of that junk?
Well, with the last album, Hobo Rocket, we just sort of manically layered stuff if it didn’t sound right. That can be good, but I think we were much more into the efficiency of instruments. Having instruments that would convey the best melody and use a really good sound instead of just heaps of peppered stuff on top of each other.

It sounds like there’s a lot more synth and electronic drums on this album.
Yeah, there’s quite a bit more of that.

“It just gets boring, hearing a guitar being strummed and drums getting whacked.”

Why is that?
We’ve been guitar-music types for ages. That’s just been the natural course of action. I guess in a way it just gets boring, hearing the sound of a guitar being strummed and drums getting whacked. It carries this implication of a certain kind of music without trying. We just generally don’t really listen to that music anymore. [Laughs] I mean, we do, but we listen to a lot of other stuff that’s based on wildly varied instrumentation or just electronics. So that was a way of making the chords and melodies we wrote just sound instantly more alien. And once you start playing something on instruments you’re not as familiar with, the songs just take on a new meaning straightaway. If you play it on a bizarre organ or synthesiser, you get different ideas for the song.

Yeah, ‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’ reminds me of a roller-rink or disco sort of song. Is it nice to have songs like that, that are more overtly a pop or party vibe?
I guess so. I don’t think we were really setting to do that. It just comes from doing it with drum machines. It’s so much more precise and minimal. Concise. Clean.

Did you each bring songs and then the other guys fleshed them out?
Each one’s different, but that’s pretty much it. Sometimes we’ve got different progressions or ideas just floating in space – they’ll be in the same key or have the same sort of emotion – and we just put them together and work them into each other. Sort of massage them into each other and I’ll write lyrics for the whole thing and we’ll gradually try to bind it into one song. You just keep doing that and seeing it as one song. So sometimes we do that and sometimes it’s just one person’s baby completely.

Did your leaving Tame Impala have any effect on the dynamic within Pond? I was wondering if you took more of a leadership role, or just had more time to devote to it.
No, not really. I could definitely put more time into it, but with Jay still being in Tame Impala and Joe always touring – because he’s a tech with them as well – I’ve just got more time to sit on my arse and scratch my belly. [Laughs]

“I started missing doing meaningless, menial, little creative doodads.”

You did a solo album as well [last year’s Ganough, Wallis and Fatuna].
Yeah, yeah. That’s what I mean by sitting on my arse and scratching my belly. Just doing other creative pursuits. I really started missing just doing meaningless, menial, little creative doodads, which is the fun part of creating. Just doing stuff for no reason whatsoever. Once it’s got a place and it’s got a market, in a way, it can change the way everything gets done.

Once you introduce deadlines and an audience, it changes how you create it.
Yeah. No matter how much you deny audiences have an effect, it’s still there in your mind – this knowledge that it’s got a listenership. That changes something whether you notice it or not, I think.

There’s always this glam element to Pond that I hear. I don’t know if it’s just the way that you sing, but is glam rock an ongoing influence on the band?
It definitely is. We love that stuff. Especially [early] Roxy Music and the first Brian Eno solo albums. They’re a big influence, just with the bizarre unstructured way that he would apply instrumentation and do it in an experimental sort of way but always come out with swagger. That was a big influence on this as well. Because we love T Rex and stuff like that, but you can get that bombast and sexy pomp while doing some weirder shit. What I love about T Rex and that style of glam is how much emotion is invested in it. That’s the best side of glam for me. It’s got this unapologetic emotion.

“Maybe we’re just getting older and more boring.”

I saw you guys do Laneway last time [in 2013]. It must feel a little funny doing it again. Do you have anything planned to change it up this time?
Yeah, well, it’s gonna be a shitload different. I think we were really on this brutal, shit-all-over-everyone’s-mind, hyperactive sonic assault when we did the last Laneway. We’re gonna do something I guess a bit more robotic, in a way. A bit more considered sonic assault rather than a rabid-lunatic type of assault, like vomiting all over everyone. [Laughs]

I don’t know, maybe we’re just getting older and more boring. Having the sonics be a bit more considered and reined in, in a way.

I’ve always liked how Pond can evolve like that from album to album, and explore different pockets of your sound.
Yeah. I think we’re getting better at being dynamic. By the time we do this Laneway, it should be quite different. “Turn off the fuzz pedal”: that’s the revelation.

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‘Man It Feels Like Space Again’ comes out tomorrow (Jan 23) on CD, vinyl and digital through EMI Australia. Read Jody Macgregor’s review. Pond are touring with Laneway Festival and doing the below sideshows in Melbourne and Sydney.

Tues, Feb 3 – The Corner, Melbourne, VIC [w/The Shabbab]
Thurs, Feb 5 – Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, NSW [w/Peter Bibby]