Heard Here

Bardo Pond
Dilate 

In an age when most rock music is compromising and conformist, Philadelphia’s Bardo Pond stand alone. Their sound differs with each song, and on Dilate, their newest effort, they shun the beefed up and watered-down production values that characterize contemporary indie rock.
The album finds Bardo Pond unabashedly indebted to several influences, most obviously the Stooges. The guitars are thick, muddy and unmistakably psychedelic, recalling the fashion of late-1960s Detroit. Sonic Youth seems to be another point of reference — spooky, atonal guitar riffs are repeated relentlessly.
Dilate is a frustrating album, primarily because the first couple songs are so good that the rest fail to match up. “Sunrise” is the best of Dilate’s good songs. Isobel Sollenberger’s vocals sound as if they were recorded backwards — eerily, the only intelligible phrase she sings is “Watching it happen,” which she repeats throughout much of the song. The minimalistic repetition and relentless guitar barrage are an obvious Stooges quote that only becomes more transparent with an extended pedal-hopping solo.
“Aphasia” has the potential to be another of Dilate’s standouts, but ultimately Bardo Pond’s fundamental problem is revealed. The harshly atonal guitar repetition admirably evokes Confusion is Sex-era Sonic Youth, but Sollenberger’s husky vocals are too far down in the mix to offset the song’s repetition — it gradually becomes tedious.
“Swig” struggles with the same problem. The slow tempo is almost haunting but the song needs the vocals pushed to the fore to maintain its spooky effect. Surprisingly, bongos make an appearance on “Swig,” revealing Bardo Pond as quintessential hip hippies.
Although Bardo Pond has been releasing albums since 1995, they still haven’t actualized their potential. Dilate inevitably fades to background music, no matter how closely one listens. Sollenberger needs to bite the bullet and turn up her vocals if Bardo Pond wants to achieve the hair-raising effect of early Sonic Youth that they are capable of.

-Nick Stillman

Ani DiFranco 
Revelling/Reckoning


It is easy to dislike Revelling/Reckoning, yet hard to dismiss it out of hand. My reaction changed dramatically when I changed the order in which I listened to Ani DiFranco’s double disc album. I played Revelling first the first time around, then I found that reversing the two makes the process a lot easier. By the time Reckoning’s over, you’re more receptive to the experimental, since by that point you need to hear a beat like a person dying of thirst needs water. 
DiFranco’s musical evolution begins to seem vital and searching, but not everything she does works. Several tracks begin with driving funk bass and a solid hook, but on some the untuned horns and other instrumentation repeat endlessly and the songs become even more discordant and the melodic line disappears. 
“Garden of Simple” and “Marrow” are the gems in the 24-carat gold of Revelling. Ani’s wicked lyricism makes its appearances: “The best minds of my generation/can’t make bail,” and there is a dearth of the holier-than-thou material that makes some of her political songs hard to take. The silliness still emerges, but by and large the lyrics are sharply personal. 
Despite its energy, Revelling is a serious album and Reckoning is even less upbeat. It is composed of slow, careful strum and picked acoustic tracks with brief electric solos in between. Even the love songs, which make up most of Reckoning, are depressing, but they have an enjoyable maturity. The woman who used to sing “I don’t use words like love, cause words like that don’t matter,” has realized that they do. 
There is also a self-reflexive quality that signals a growing songwriter. “Imagine That” is a knockout, as is “School Night,” which ushers in a whole new era of storytelling for folk music, and a string of those dizzying metaphors which Ani executes so well. The personal and the reflective meld nicely in “Old Old Song,” a song about the divorce of Ani’s parents. 
The never-ending somberness of Reckoning can be wearing, but the songs are mostly well-considered and lyrically complex. The albums do balance each other nicely, but do not listen to both together. It’s over two hours of a much too cerebral experience. The brain overload would probably send you scurrying back to Little Plastic Castle to remind yourself why you liked Ani in the first place. But, Ani’s listeners will return again to think about the musical issues raised by Revelling/Reckoning and the less sure, more introspective person Ani is becoming.
-Jessica Rosenberg

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
B.R.M.C.


Gangster rap is the music of the inner city, pop-punk that of the suburbs, and Nashville country the soundtrack to the modern American network of small towns built like strip-malls. Then what is the music of urban wilderness, of the abandoned industrial areas of cities, of cement, railroad tracks and the smell of smoke and iron that surrounds them? Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. At least, that’s what they want to be. 
The many pictures of the three members of B.R.M.C. in their self-titled major labeled debut picture the three young men (mod haircuts, tight black pants, Doc Martens and all) posing around all sorts of landmarks of the urban wilderness, smoking cigarettes, of course. We get shots of the lads by the aforementioned tracks, on or around aqueducts, viaducts, littered meadows and then around and inside that wayside chapel of the industrial wilderness, the dive of a nightclub where our heroes perform.
B.R.M.C. (named after Marlon Brando’s bike gang in The Wild Ones) have a huge buzz in their hometown of San Francisco, presumably due to their rediscovery of the psychedelic sound born there 35 years ago. While most rockin’ bands from the Bay Area in the past 10 years have based their sounds on punk rock, the only recent reference points for B.R.M.C. would be the Jesus and Mary Chain by way of the Dandy Warhols. Fuzz boxes have been surgically attached to the guitars, the vocals are often doubled and tripled, sounding like smoky echoes of themselves, the bass is always ready to lead the way whenever the guitar needs to get caught up in itself and keyboards add plenty of depth to the songs.
“I fell in love with a sweet sensation/I gave my heart to a simple code/I gave my soul to a new religion/Whatever happened to my rock ’n’ roll”–– so goes the chorus to the anthem of the album, “Whatever Happened To My Rock ’N’ Roll (Punk Song).” This is a pretty good model for the rest of the lyric writing on the album — not overly intellectual or clever, just good solid rock and roll lyrics about rock, love and Jesus. Jesus? Yes, religion provides the base for many of these songs, though whether they are skeptical or not, cynical or serious remains a personal decision for each listener. The most overtly religious are “Awake,” “White Palms,” and “Salvation.”
On the whole, this album is pretty rockin’, pretty solid. At their best B.R.M.C. combines the elements of psychedelic rock with punk abandon and a steady groove that simply rock. And that’s all that matters.

-Chris DeWeese