Modular People

March 2, 2012

Beard Wives Denim was recorded in a ramshackle old farmhouse in Western Australia. Pond piled into the house with ten friends, all their equipment, amplifiers, instruments, and pets, and lived in their house-cum-studio for two weeks. People camped in tents in the fields, wood was chopped, cows and kangaroos roamed, and this album was lovingly created.

This is Pond's 4th album, and their first release with Modular Recordings.

Pond was born under a mulberry tree in Daglish, Western Australia, by Joseph Ryan, Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson. Under said mulberry tree they conceived the idea of an album of tropical psychedelic idiocy that they performed that night at a friends party in North Perth. That album, recorded in their living room about twenty meters from the mulberry tree, was called Psychedelic Mango, released on local Perth label Badminton Bandit.

In the next few years Pond recorded two albums with producer and buddy Sam Ford, Corridors of Blissterday (Badminton Bandit) and Frond (Hole in the Sky) and played a bunch of shows in around Australia and Japan, supporting MGMT and playing at the St. Jerome's Laneway Festival.

It was around this time that Pond determined to pursue their goal of living out the ultimate pop music career cliche from start to finish, from the lo-fi bedroom beginnings, through the rambling unfocused jam album and into the bombastic studio pop sellout. The next step, of course, was to make a not-as-good follow up to the studio pop album, complete with over inflated egos, internal conflict and rehab. This step didn't sound that great, so Pond skipped it and went straight to the next rock'n'roll archetype; the country get away to rediscover their love of making music and find God and grow beards and chop wood and all that business.

So in 2010, at a friend's farmhouse in Eagle Bay, Western Australia, Pond piled in with all their instruments, amplifiers, friends, recording equipment and Sam Ford to record Beard Wives Denim. The house had three rooms, a large living room-kitchen-bedroom which held the instruments, the children's bedroom which served as the studio room, and the toilet, which served as the vocal booth. This left no room for sleeping, so tents were erected in the yard, the gate shut against the roaming cows and kangaroos, and Pond began recording.

After two weeks of Lord of the Flies-esque bonding with Frisbee and guitars and absolutely no religion or wood chopping or wives or beards, the album was finished. It a whole lot less like Neil Young, the Grateful Dead or the Band than Pond had imagined when the idea started, but it's the thought that counts.

Mixed by Kevin Parker and Rob Grant at Poon's Head Studio in Perth, Beard Wives Denim is an audio diary of ten friends' strange, terrible and blissful time in the country trying in vain to be a wholesome family band. It sounds just like it, distorted and woozy and fractured and ultimately nostalgic and loving and coming to your closest hip and with it record vendor in 2012, through Modular Records.

Tracklist

1. Fantastic Explosion of Time
2. When It Explodes
3. Elegant Design
4. Sorry I was Under the Sky
5. Sun and Sea and You
6. Allergies
7. You Broke My Cool
8. Moth Wings
9. Leisure Pony
10. Mystery
11. Dig Brother
12. Eye Pattern Blindness
13. Moreno's Blend