1. Bardo PondLapsed
I heard them in college where I was music director of the radio station. I was very lucky, I got to become the music director because I was such a geek. I had spent high school just obsessively listening to music, and I didn’t have a great school experience so music was my friend. Someone at the radio station described Bardo Pond to me as sludge rock and I was like, what is that? This is the first album of theirs I heard and the first song hits really hard, ‘Tommy Gun Angel’, which I don’t know what that means, and I was just completely paralysed by it, like taking a drug or something. I loved the vocals. I loved that they were sloppy and incoherent and not pretty, or not super-pretty. At the time I was listening to what I guess you would call shoegazer music, and I liked it, but it was a little too shimmery for me. I felt like there weren’t any germs. I really like music where I feel as if the people making it have dirt under their fingernails. This felt sloppy in a good way. Not in a lazy way, but ‘this is what we want to do and we want to sound big and overwhelming and borderless’. I just immediately fell in love. It just became a gateway into messier music. At that point I hadn’t really liked big walls of distorted guitar. But something about this record really changed my mind and made me more interested in walls of noise.
