Album review: Pond, Hobo Rocket (Modular Recordings)

If mutant garage-psychedelia is your thing, then Aussie quintet Pond's Hobo Rocket should have your head spinning. There's an audible lysergic fizz about everything in tracks such as “Giant Tortoise” and “Odarma”, with their cosmic-swirl phasing, stereo panning and tendrils of sitar, while heavier cuts like “Xanman” and the epochal “Whatever Happened to the Million Head Collide?” offer brutal, shrill psych-rock weirdness, their squalling guitars careening around Nick Allbrook's piercing, high-register vocals. It's perhaps best summed up by the desultory guest mumbler of “Hobo Rocket” itself – presumably the hobo? – who enquires disgustedly, “What kind of drugs you guys on?”. All kinds, by the sound of it.

Download: Whatever Happened To The Million Head Collide?; Xanman; Odarma; Hobo Rocket