Bardo Pond

"Don't know about you," Bardo Pond's Isobel Sollenberger snarls a few minutes into her band's latest LP, "but I'm willing to wait." That remains the eternal dilemma at the heart of the Philly mainstays' sludgy, slow-burning, obstinately retrograde stoner rock: Can you stick around to watch this thing unfurl, or do you have someplace else you've gotta be? It's the thing that keeps Bardo Pond fans split between the obsessive and the nonexistent; you can bide an awful lot of time waiting for a Bardo Pond track-- hell, sometimes a whole album-- to get to the good part, and not everybody's got that kind of time. Can you spare a minute? How's about 70?

Bardo's latest, their eighth LP, is a self-titled affair, and the choice to go eponymous couples well with the band's stated desire to offer up a sort of distillation of its many strengths. Naturally, this particular bunch of pharma-enthusiasts have a somewhat looser notion of concision and clarity than most, and with its extraterrestrial expanses, floaty flute-drift, gnarled molasses guitars, and average song length landing on the long side of 10 minutes, Bardo Pond never feels particularly reeled in. Yet, for Bardo Pond, throwing everything at the wall makes for a kind of coherence; from their small-run experimental discs to their semi-formal proper LPs, their slowpoke psychonaut scuzz has floated into all sorts of strange places, with a low to match every high. Bardo Pond holds a mirror up to all of that, proving just as casually transcendent-- and frustratingly sputter-prone-- as the band itself.

Take opener "Just Once", which starts with kind of a happenstance guitar strum and an equally tentative-seeming Sollenberger vocal. A few more instruments glide into the mix, and Sollenberger's singing starts clinging to a loose structure, but it's quite easy to get three minutes into it before you realize it's kinda kicking your ass. What sounded at first like a half-forgotten Lucinda Williams demo has cracked the sky open with a streak of widescreen post-rock. Gently nudging a half-assed folk song into the clouds like this would be quite a back-breaker for most young bands, but Bardo Pond is just warming up. Sollenberger shrugs off the second coming in the seedy, Sabbath-like "Don't Know About You"; in just four and a half minutes, it gets in, flips the blacklight on, then bids a hasty retreat. "The Stars Behind" might scrape the 13-minute mark, but its dense fog of shoegaze guitars and Sollenberger's pleading, near-wordless vocal feel like they could (and maybe oughta) go on forever. And the extra-sludgy, more traditionally metal "Cracker Wrist" finds the Brothers Gibbons duking it out on a couple of especially irate-sounding guitars, then allowing the rhythm section chop through the scene with a machete. Rickety but never rambling, constantly in motion however slow, these four far-flung tunes are the playing up of strengths promised by the LP title.

Then there's the other three. All 37 minutes' worth of them. One can hardly fault a song called "Sleeping" for drowsiness-- particularly from this lot-- but boy, is it ever driftless. The monstrous 21-minute "Undone" that follows at least has some heft, but it feels lost in its own labyrinth until they shove the track into wall-of-sound mode just about halfway through. It's not that the song's payoff is especially inspired, it's just so well choreographed from the song's first seconds, you wonder why they'd waste so much time dancing around the eventuality. And closer "Waynes Tune", an Earth-y mescalized foot-shuffler, limps along. At the end of most any other Bardo Pond LP, it'd prove the fittingly nonchalant capper; here, though, dwarfed as it is by the maelstrom of "The Stars Behind", that it just kind of peters out feels like more of a waste than usual. But I suppose it wouldn't be a Bardo Pond album without a few extraneous seconds-- er, minutes-- and some stuff that'd sound better if only that guy from that one party would call you back. So if the sprawling, all-bases-loaded Bardo Pond isn't the band's best LP, it might be their most representative: both the tiresome excess and the lung-blackening reward.