Bufo Alvarius

Fire presents as part of their Fire Records Embers series a deluxe remastered reissue of Bardo Pond's first album, Bufo Alvarius, originally released on Drunken Fish in 1995, including a bonus track. Bardo Pond is a wide-eyed Philadelphian psychedelic rock unit that exists as a shining point on a graph. A scintillating cross drawn on a celestial arc, marking their place among the 13th Floor Elevators, Calico Wall, Spacemen 3, My Bloody Valentine, and, more recently, Jackie-O Motherfucker and MV & EE. Explicitly narcotic - there's no room for coyness or prissiness in space rock! - the band was initially an excuse for abyssal guitar drone exploration by brothers Michael and John Gibbons. But Bufo Alvarius (named after a potently hallucinogenic toad), their classic 1995 album, marked an important turning point. It was like the flickering cine-8 film of someone falling off a cliff played backwards. A hazy figure leaping out of the void, pausing at the second their foot touched terra firma. It was the juncture where their music clarified out of chaos and started to coalesce around formations of post-rock, shoegaze and psych structure while always threatening to dissolve into a blizzard of reverb, white noise, fuzz drone and echoplex. This was the album that saw them graduate from cult local concern to cult global passion, stepping out from the monolithic shadows cast by their influences. It is difficult to pick out individual high points on something so clearly designed to be listened to as a whole, but the lysergic ebb and flow of "Capillary River," the aqueous beauty of "Absence" and, of course, the half-hour long centerpiece of (CD-only track) "Amen" demand full attention from the listener. The previously-unreleased "Fixed" rounds off an album that is transcendent in all the right meanings of the word.