I went to a couple record stores again, and found RVG's sophomore album "Feral" on massive discount. I snatched this up gleefully, listened, and then did a search of the blog assuming I posted about it back in 2020. Nope...I posted about "Quality of Mercy" in 2017 and mentioned RVG in 2019, but that's it - 2 posts for this great Melbourne, Australia based band.
RVG (Romy Vager Group) definitely owe a debt to The Go-Betweens, but they're so much more than that. I can't help but think of the intensity of Graeme Downes (The Verlaines) singing when listening to Vager sing on "I Used To Love You". And I also am reminded of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever when listening to this. Finally, the hype sticker on the front of this mentions The Smiths' riffs. Indeed, you can definitely identify Marr-like vibes and reverb.
A terrific little record that got lost in the rock and pop shuffle of the early 90s. This ramshackle band was led by former Vaselines co-leader Eugene Kelly. After The Vaselines broke up, he formed a band called Captain America, but had to change that name after two singles once Marvel Comics found out and enter....Eugenius!
In their short career, the band only released two LPs (and several singles), but this 14-song debut was pretty fantastic, if a bit overlooked (despite all of the hype from the Nirvana guy).
Think of them as a slightly better-produced Vaselines (with more instrumentation), but still with Kelly's wonderfully tipsy vision. This record starts off with three top-notch pop gems in the title track, the breezy "Breakfast," and the coulda-been-a-Vaselines song "One Too Many."
Also in the 2nd half of the album, don't miss other squirrelly pop winners like "Flame On," "Bed-In," and Buttermilk."
If you dug this record back then, then rediscover it now, and if you missed it, well, you're in for a real treat.
As its title indicates, Volume 9 is the ninth in a series of releases, dating back to 2000, of outtakes, jams and Bardo Pond-related sonic ephemera. But while most of the earlier Volumes were originally made and distributed independently by the band (on CDr, in small batches), Volume 9 has been released by Bardo Pond’s current label Fire Records on vinyl and as a digital download. The new (sorta) record makes visible Fire’s ongoing reissue campaign of the Volumes, including a number on vinyl of various splashy shades. That enterprise may principally be a collector’s fixation, and one might wonder about the relative value of the music, beyond the layers of insider hipness, the fluorescent orange records and the many, many 15-minute-plus explorations of deep and dark psychic terrain.
The relatively higher profile of its release implies that something is different about Volume 9, and the record makes good on that gesture. To be sure, if one listens to some of the earlier Volumes, there’s a charm to their shaggy-dog quality; see Volume 3, which wanders elliptically from informal studio jams like “Sifaka” to intensely stoned improv meditations like “Lomand” — sounds, one imagines, of a typical weekend at Lemur House in the early Aughts. Volume 9, on the other hand,feels like a more sonically focused affair, and the record makes more sense as a record, rather than just a collection of moments, however winning or blissed out.
Tracks on the first side — the long-ish (by Bardo standards, anyway, for whom songs don’t get really long until you top 20 minutes) “Conjunctio” and “The Nine Doubts” — were both recorded with Philly percussionist Michael Zanghi, likely best known as the drummer in the Violators, Kurt Vile’s live and frequent backing band. On these recordings, Zanghi leans into Eastern textures and flavors. There are suggestions of tabla in “Conjunctio,” along with tambourine and other hand-held percussive instruments. The Gibbons brothers’ fuzzed and fucked-with guitars dominate, as ever, but Bardo listeners who dig it when Isobel Sollenberger picks up her flute (and if you don’t, what are you doing listening to the band in the first place?) will want to tune into her playing, which hangs at the edge of the mix, spectral and mournful.
While “Conjunctio” suggests a bare melody and spends the rest of its time floating in the general area of that suggestion, “War is Over” is far more grounded in harmonic statement and something approaching song form. Two versions of the song appear on Volume 9: a three-minute statement and a twenty-one minute exploration of the statement’s potential. Both are evocative, yearning, a little melancholy. But the long version is the real deal, and for listeners attracted to the band’s sludgy psychedelia, it’s a terrific experience. Few bands are able to combine deliberation and slow accumulation with ecstatic abandon like Bardo Pond, and “War is Over” works that dynamic masterfully. While the song does not achieve the transcendent chaos of some of the band’s most sublime performances (see their cover of “Maggot Brain,” for instance, but buckle up), its fealty to its basic melodic structure makes it special and beautiful in different ways.
Volume 9 might not be the best way in to Bardo Pond’s particular powers and pleasures for the novice, but for anyone already familiar with the band’s remarkable music, the record is more than just a number for the completist. You’ll play it. And it will fill you with the peculiar, sometimes magnificent, sometimes terrifying joy that only Bardo Pond can create.
