REVIEW: Pond Turned a Hot Tuesday Night in Austin Into Something to Remember
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY SOPHIE GRAGG ☆
Photo By Jennifer Greene
THERE ARE NIGHTS WHEN A SHOW CATCHES YOU COMPLETELY OFF GUARD - when you walk into a venue and immediately feel that something special is about to happen. Last night at Mohawk Outdoor, Pond delivered exactly that kind of night.
I've been to a lot of shows at Mohawk, but I genuinely don't think I've ever seen it that packed. People were shoulder to shoulder, pressed up against each other in the hot September air, and nobody seemed to care. There was an energy in that crowd before the band even played a note: a collective sense of anticipation from a room full of people who clearly knew what they were about to witness. For me, it was my first time seeing Pond live, and it certainly won't be my last.
The Perth-born, Fremantle-bred psychedelic rock band — featuring Jay Watson and Nick Allbrook, both of whom have toured with Tame Impala — have been at this for over fifteen years, and it shows in the best possible way. This is a band that has played Glastonbury, Coachella, and shared stages with Queens of the Stone Age and the Flaming Lips. They know how to command a room. But what struck me most about their Mohawk set was how unadorned it was. No elaborate visuals, no production tricks, no bells and whistles. Just five musicians playing rock and roll like it was the only thing in the world that mattered, and somehow making a few hundred sweaty people in Austin on a Tuesday night feel the same way.
People were dancing, singing along, losing themselves in it. The band dropped some fun banter between songs — loose, warm, the kind of stage presence that makes a show feel like a hang rather than a performance — but mostly they just played. The crowd responded to every second of it. I haven't felt a room that alive and that engaged at a show in a long time.
Pond arrived in Austin fresh off support dates with Djo and riding the momentum of Terrestrials, their tenth album, released last month. It's a record that twitches with the weight of the world - extractive capitalism, inequality, people and planet on the brink, but ultimately bets on beauty to prevail. That tension translated perfectly in a live setting. Their songs feel enormous without being overblown, urgent without being exhausting, psychedelic without losing the thread back to something that just rocks.
For the final song of the night, Kevin Parker, the Tame Impala mastermind who has long orbited the Pond universe through Watson and Allbrook, walked out onto the Mohawk stage to join the band for Mink Mussel Creek's "Makeout Party Girls." The crowd lost it. It was the kind of moment that feels almost too perfect for a Tuesday night, the kind of thing you tell people about for years. A packed outdoor venue, a hot Austin night, and one of the most celebrated figures in modern psychedelic rock playing one more song just because he could.
Walking out of Mohawk last night, damp from the heat and still buzzing, I remembered exactly why I love this city and why I love going to shows here.
