Look!Pond“Look!Pond”
CD 2006 Self-Released
Matt Kennedy is one of my favourite people in the entire world. We first met via mail, he ordered some CDRs from me, and over time sent me copies of his early cassettes including “Opaltruceminxx” (collaboration with James Dee, now just called Minxx), “Rich Parents” (also with Dee and his then-housemate Kieran, recently of Deaf! Deaf!), other solo projects such as “Whip is Whisk”, and his main band at the time, French Horns. He would post them off with letters printed on the back of photocopied pages from books such as The Catcher in the Rye, and throw in garb like essays he wrote in high school with red pen corrections all over them. In turn I sent him as much as I could offer and we started to collect each other’s back catalogues.
We were introduced in person the first time when I was playing my second ever gig with my Alps project, together we were opening for Die! Die! Die! and he was down in Sydney with French Horns. He’s almost short, stares at his feet a lot and scratches his head before answering questions, but quiet as he is, he has his quirks. Once Matt threw couches off someone’s balcony at a party. Another time at a festival we played together he seemed fascinated by a hill in the distance, and kept remarking on what might be on the other side. At the end of the day he disappeared and after we looked everywhere for him we noticed his tiny figure off in the distance, fading out into the backdrop of the mysterious hill.
Matt Kennedy is a Midas of sorts, with that finger of golden touch generally pissing blood out all of the scratch plate of a left handed guitar, or a saucepan welded onto a drum kit. Everything he does is great. Look!Pond though, takes Matt’s talents and ideas above and beyond everything else he’s done. The demo tape with the red man on the front appeared in my mailbox like a beacon of hope for punk rock in Australia. It opens with the early-Swans-like bass heavy sludge of Kitchens Floor, followed by a breakneck drum machine kicking into Pikelets, probably my song of 2005. Matt said the song is a Big Black ripoff. And I can’t totally disagree, it does sound a lot like Big Black, but I can’t turn on it, because it’s like a song a young Albini never wrote but should have. It ranks up there with the heaviest, fastest and most powerful, if it had have been included on the tracklisting of Atomiser or Bulldozer, it would stand out as one of the best.
Matt recorded the 4 song demo, followed by a 3”EP, both alone with a four-track machine, playing every guitar, bass, drum, keyboard and vocal part on his lonesome, proving himself to be an absolute master. It was always his intention to do Look!Pond as a band, but the bar was set pretty high for his musicians and it took a while before the camp came together. Finally Matt was joined by his long term collaborator James Dee on bass, and old On/Ox drummer Alex on drums and saucepans, and work started on the full length early on in the lineup.
At the end of 2006 Look!Pond released their album themselves after only playing a small handful of shows. Of the nine tracks on the album, seven were previously released on the cassette and 3”, but all were reworked with James and Alex. Not much change was made to the Arab on Radar-ish songs of the second EP, perhaps due to Matt having the band idea in mind when originally creating them. However on the three songs from the cassette “Kitchen’s Floor”, “Pikelets”, and “Park”, they abandon all industrial/punk power, drop most of the bass from the guitar sound and loosen everything up, giving them a feel more like some of their Australian post punk contemporaries like Vincent Over the Sink. The album certainly isn’t void of industrial power though, I have found myself skipping through to track 7 to hear the mighty build up towards the albums closing number, a song of somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of sludge anger meets hard-hitting precision. Track 9 alone could make the entire album, and despite my attachment to the demo tape, I feel it to be their magnum opus.
I have told everyone all over the world that Look!Pond are the best band in Australia, and that’s for one reason, because they are.
