Watching Pond across the pond. The Australian psychedelic rock band managed to send Jakarta’s audience into psychedelic frenzy.
POND, a band that shares a lot of its members with Tame Impala, associated with many different cool bands such as GUM, Mink Mussel Creek, and Space Lime Peacock; the band that single-handedly introduced the wonderful sound of neo-psychedelic music to a broader set of listeners was performing last Sunday at The Pallas, Jakarta, Indonesia.
Coming from Perth, Australia this band was originally a collaborative project where anyone can play anything they wanted. After so many revolved members, the band currently consist of Nick Albrook, Jay Watson, Joe Ryan and Jamie Terry. With a pretty fast pace to follow the success of Tame Impala, since 2009 they had made seven albums already, supported Artic Monkeys throughout Australia in 2014, and performed in many big festivals such as Primavera and Field Days.
In 2012, Pond was named by NME as “The Hottest Band in The World” in its “Hot List”, with the help of Kevin Parker their music feels more mature without losing its fun. After years, the band slowly shows its differences from Tame Impala. The Weather, their current album was pretty much their focus to date.
The concert was opened by Jakarta’s new rock band, Feast, their strong visual and energizing music has managed to heat up the stage and left an impact since the crowd got more excited to see the main act. POND commenced the night with “30,000 Megatons” and “Sweep Me Off My Feet” that builds anticipation within the crowd. The sonic sound of “Waiting Around For Grace” and “Zen Automaton”, which they played back to back, successfully made people nod their head, and dance. The perfect combination of songs from almost all their albums, which shaped the whole night’s set list, was great.
The thing about concert is that it needs to be in a perfect package, the space was ok because you can grab drinks easily, and the whole sound was good, but we’re expecting more stage act to go along with a pretty colorful lighting and more seamless concert especially on schedule (everyone waited for almost two hours, since the gate and overall schedule was pushed back an hour or so). As they left the stage after their 14th song, they returned for encore with their biggest hit to date “Man It Feels Like Space Again”, the whole concert was enjoyable and the fans were pretty much satisfied with their performance and excited with the warm welcome from Allbrook and Ryan who took turn greeting the audience.
After all, kudos for the Sonic Live Asia and StubHub Indonesia for bringing them here. Never in our mind would we expect them to come here, knowing that their fan base here was not as big as their counterpart. We hope they will bring more ‘Indie’ bands in the future. Melody’s Echo Chamber maybe? Or the nostalgia-inducing sound of Gold Celeste?