Another year, another untouchable masterpiece from Bong. Same old, same old, but if you’re waiting for my enthusiasm for this band to fade with time, seems you’re in for a long wait. I probably don’t need to tell you that they sound all better now that I’ve actually got SPEAKERS.

Following the tongue-in-cheek apotheosis of last year’s ‘Stoner Rock’, the aesthetic hand brake turn the band perform here is something of a stroke of genius, as the bulbous, mutant mushroom-filled sci-fi dreamscapes depicted on the former album’s artwork are replaced with a twelve inch square detail from J.M.W Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ - gentle, rolling plains stretching out like some visionary recreation of the Thames beneath the band’s sigil-like logo. That it is my favourite album cover of 2015 almost goes without saying. (Fuck all these ‘portraits’ egotistically clogging up the fronts of contemporary LPs, you’ve got to love a band that’s into landscapes.)

Correspondingly, this time around Bong take their source texts not from Lovecraft or Dunsany, but from a few brief stanzas that I take to be of the band’s own composition; simple statements of cosmic positivity of a stripe rare in these dark days, and of course, they have to musical weight needed to back them up.

As I’m sure the Bong would appreciate given the previous fun & games they’ve had with genre signifiers and expectations, ‘We Were..’ expands their sonic palette to the extent that, by the end of side # 2, using the term ‘doom’ as a shorthand for this music seems utterly ridiculous. Indeed, ‘We Are..’ must be Bong’s least conventionally ‘heavy’ set to date, rivalled only by 2013’s ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ or their off-beat 2009 debut ‘Bethamoora’.

As I’m sure I must have opined previously in these pages, Bong’s ‘metal’ ancestry becomes distant indeed when they’re in this mood, setting sail instead for the realms of what I personally prefer to term ‘pure psychedelia’ – the same kind of non-denominational, maximalist ‘head music’ that served to take such prior explorers as Alice Coltrane, The Boredoms or Parson Sound well beyond the radar of their respective source genres.

On the A side here, ‘Time Regained’ does at least ground us with a familiar distorted rumble of sub-bass, decaying notes flat and placid as the gentle waters depicted by Turner, as a glacial locked groove rhythm from drummer Mike Smith keeps nerves soothed and clocks slowly ticking beneath. By the time Dave Terry’s magisterial proclamations enter at the half-way mark, sounding more assured and less potentially comical than at any point in the band’s prior catalogue, we been lifted to a mighty, head-nodding plateau of cascading, eternal echoes, room reverberating like a giant delay pedal, leaving us perfectly placed to chew over his words; “Friends, do not fear for the future / We are, we were, and we will have been / We are giants in time / Astride the ages”. Heavy in the ‘60s sense of the word. I think I hear Michael Moorcock knocking out there somewhere, if I could only but reach the door handle…

Suitably revived, we move on to the flip, where ‘Find Your Own Gods’ opens with an equally stark pronouncement from our narrator; “Find your own gods / not in dreary chapels and dismal shrines / but under the stones and streams / in faint mist on familiar hills / through soft morning light / behind the shadow of trees.”

For the track that follows, Bong dispense entirely with their conventional walls of amp roar, leaving the way open instead for a sprawling, open-skied jaunt down-river, conjured largely from phased string warble, crystalline synth drone, eerie cymbal swish and frail, woody, echoing tones wracked judiciously from Ben Freeth’s augmented Shahi Baaja set-up, before the drums eventually enter once again, like a bosun’s yelled instruction, pointing the way, ever forward, like the pulse that might have echoed through an alternative version of ‘Aguirre: The Wrath of God’ in which Kinski’s fevered quest really did lead him to a lost city of gold....

Another year. Another tax return. Another optician’s appointment. Another pay freeze. Another Bong LP. Life in the eternal now’s not so bad.

Listen and buy from Ritual Productions.

Labels: best of 2015, Bong