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Includes immediate download of 6-track album in the high-quality format of your choice (MP3, FLAC, and more), plus unlimited mobile access using the free Bandcamp listening app.
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The Land Of Only 02:08
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2.
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Tarahumara 03:49
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3.
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Luna Sway 12:35
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4.
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Painted Sun 05:35
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5.
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Fox 08:01
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6.
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Crash Gamera 05:45
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“Shone Like a Ton” was remastered by Michael Gibbons and Patrick Klem.
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Die Easy 06:51
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Apple Eye 05:58
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Dragonfly 06:04
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4.
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Blues Tune 05:48
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5.
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Trip Fuck 06:19
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6.
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Hummingbird Mountain 05:10
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7.
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New Drunks 04:30
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8.
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Affa 05:27
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9.
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Tests For New Swords 05:19
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10.
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Good Friday 03:51
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11.
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Jungle Tune 06:38
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12.
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Sangh Seriatim 21:52
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Bardo Pond’s new release, Refulgo, comes from the other side of their storied musical history. It collects tracks from the impossible-to-find early 7”s and compilations from the years surrounding their 1995 debut Bufo Alvarius. The collection’s title, Refulgo, is appropriately retrospective, coming from the Latin word for reflecting light or shining back brilliantly—“flash back” would not be an unreasonable translation (it seems the hallucinogenic references scattered across their album titles have gotten downright scholarly). The collection documents the band in the days in which its stable lineup was just crystalizing around the brothers John and Michael Gibbons on guitars and Isobel Sollenberger on flute, violin and vocals. Bob Sentz is still playing drums on some of the early tracks, soon to be replaced by Joe Culver; and longtime bassist Clint Takeda only appears on the back half of the collection. Bardo Pond was then only just emerging from Yuengling-fueled sonic rituals in Philly row homes into a working band with steady gigs at the Khyber Pass and singles on Compulsiv and Drunken Fish. The sound they were pursuing was an uncompromising, and at times, bewitching, brand of American free music: slashing and overdriven guitars, thunderous drums, ghostly flute, infinite feedback and transported vocals that sound like mad Ophelia before she went into the river.
Bardo Pond’s early recordings are just savage; both the chops and the extraordinary control that marked the band’s later output were still, it must be said, embryonic. But the recklessness is glorious, nonetheless. For all the band’s talk of free jazz and no wave influences, the early Bardo Pond often got by on a kind of damaged blues. You can hear it on the almost-groove of “Dragonfly” and even more so on the electrocuted 12-bar of its B-side, “Blues Tune,” originally released as a 7” on Compulsiv in November 1994. The ambling “New Drunks” also (from July 1995) builds on a tortured blues lick. The transcendent “Hummingbird Mountain” is an album highlight, smearing lugubrious guitar scuzz on top on surprisingly funky drumming—the bottom dances, while the top dives: the effect is almost anthemic. The prickly, addictive “Jungle Tune” is even tighter, dispelling just enough of the murk to pass at times for positively groovy. But it is the seering, ascension of “Affa” (from the 1996 Ptolemaic Terrascope collection Succour) that best foreshadows the band’s development into purveyors of exquisite head music. This direction is confirmed by the blissful album closer, the twenty-two minute epic “Sangh Seriatim,” which encapsulated the droning, sun-drenched orientalism of the band’s masterful sophomore album, Amanita.
The title Refulgo is perhaps more than a little ironic, as Bardo Pond has often been seen in a reflected critical light. They were often taken for slack noiseniks a la Sonic Youth; or an American Jesus & Mary Chain; or epic post-rockers like Mogwai. But really they were always simply Bardo Pond, a free rock band from Philadelphia. On Refulgo, we hear the inception of an American original.
—Brent S. Sirota
January 2014