Review: Bong - Thought and Existence

                         "The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood"

Sorry to any eschatologists out there but those bible dudes weren't foretelling the end of the world and the eternal damnation of humanity but rather they got wind of a new Bong album. Round these parts any release that involves Mike Vest is happily, nay greedily, recieved but a new Bong release is another level of special. I can't think of any other band like Bong...yes, there are many, many bands that play 'doom' and many, many, many that profess to be 'psychedelic' and even some that successfully marry the two but Bong are a unique beast..not so much doom as glacier-like and, depending on your own personal interpretation of psychedelic, a band that can mentally take you anywhere. In fact, sod it, let's throw out those tired and worn tags and just say Bong are....Bong!

A mate came round the other day whilst I was listening to this album and said "are these the same guys who did that Dopesmoker album" and I can sort of see that...the sloooow percussion and glacial tempo but...and this is a big but...bands like Sleep etc are riff based...long, heavy and slow riffs but riffs nonetheless, Bong don't have riffs. Vest is a man who can riff better than most (hear his work in Blown Out, Lush Worker etc) but in Bong the riffs are put aside and rely instead on a solid wall of noise, any melody is put to one side in favour of atmospherics and heaviness. This is what gives the band that hypnotic and hypnagogic quality that keeps you mesmerised. And the heaviness...hell yeah, this stuff can level mountains. The album is just the two tracks: 'The Golden Fields’ and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, 17 and 19 minutes in lengths respectively and between them they lead us a shamanic journey...after listening and immersing ourselves we feel like we have been taken to an altered state of consciousness and ritualistically healed. 'The Golden Fields' opens with a quote from Dostoevsky's nihilistic classic 'The Dream Of a Ridiculous Man':

                " it happened as it always does in dreams when you skip over space 
                   and time, and the laws of thought and existence, and only pause
                   on the points for which the heart yearns."

As for why the band chose to use that particular story as a touchpoint is for them to answer - to surmise would entail something approaching a PhD thesis - but on face value one can identify the nihilism in Bong's music - crushingly heavy, selpulchral and devoid of light. However, much the same as the story, the dreamlike reverie into which one can fall via the music does leave one open to introspection and insights. Both 'The Golden Fields' and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ have this effect, by the time the low and funereal vocals come in we are deep into a fugue state where all aspects of personality are put aside in a kind of disassociative amnesia - we are one with the music and there is only the music....in many ways it is the very epitome of mindfullness. I kid you not...such is the power on Bong!

'Thought and Existence' is out May 4th on Ritual Productions and there is a clear blue with glow-in-the-dark splatter heavyweight edition, housed in hand silk-screened sleeves (blue & silver editions) and hand numbered too that will be exclusive to the Ritual Prods. site. There will be, however, a black heavyweight LP available everywhere.