by David Wilikofsky
The term post-rock was first coined by music critic Simon Reynolds in order to give name to a new trend: artists using rock instruments and sounds to create music that was decidedly not rock. Post-rock wasn’t so much a scene or single group of musicians as it was a globally emerging sensibility, a term that could be easily applied to artists as disparate as Slint, Tortoise, Movietone or Seefeel; crucially, it was a sufficiently nebulous term to capture the wide variety of genres (for instance, dub, electronica, classical, jazz or ambient) its practitioners were pulling from. What united them was a focus on tone and texture rather than melody and riffs, a quality that bondo, a Los Angeles based four piece, share. The quartet create music that fits neatly into this lineage yet feels as expansive as the term post-rock itself. From skittering dub rhythms to glacial slowcore, bondo collage the past into something decidedly modern.
I called out Slint and Tortoise above because moments on bondo’s debut album, Print Selections, bought to mind classics from both of these bands; the instrumentals and mumbly vocals on tracks like “Mind Room” feel like they could be long lost Spiderland outtakes, while their deft, subtle use of found sound echoes some choice Tortoise cuts (see the opening moments of “Djed”). However, bondo’s music feels more rooted in rhythmic structures than either of these bands. While groups like Slint or Tortoise use the sonic fingerprints of rock music to build something loose and impressionistic, bondo use tightly wound rhythms and fractured melodies to etch geometric outlines of vast and mysterious forces. Their cryptic lyrics point in the same direction, at times asking the listener to “let it all go” and seemingly submit to the pull of their music. Whether filtering these messages through angular post-hardcore melodies or dreamy slowcore textures, Print Selections is an album that tends to offers more questions than answers. It’s best enjoyed as an immersive experience; allow yourself to get swept up in its currents, simply following them wherever they happen to take you.