Hash Jar Tempo
Under Glass
Drunken Fish

If the Verve (they did record things before "Bittersweet Symphony" where the drugs worked quite well, actually) had recorded a song for their first EP called "Endless Goo," it might have sounded something like this. HJT is the collaboration between the Philly sludge-drone behemoth that is Bardo Pond, and New Zealander Roy Montgomery, a man who’s also been known to be quite fond of hanging on a note for half an hour or so.

In HJT, Bardo gets more melody, due to the detailed, cleaner sounds of Montgomery, who gets a rock band and all manner of peat-colored aural roux (you make gumbo out of it) to further power his sonics. This disc lumbers forth with many monolithic moments as good or better than Bardo's Amanita or Lapsed, and with an equal number of bliss-from-the-Eastern winds movements straight from records like Montgomery's Temple IV.

The development of the pieces is more complex and searching than what some may have previously heard from Bardo. They stay in the same place better than most, but until now, exploratory, ever-changing sound in the indie-space-jam mode of the '90s was done better by the likes of Magnog. On Under Glass, though, tracks like "Atropine", stretch out, morph, reach and top the closest peaks of change Bardo Pond had ever found. A new form of propulsion has been found in Lemur House Studio, plop down in your favorite chair and let the CD cover-colored aural green exhaust from HJT's engines encrust you wholly.

— Pearson Greer (el_syzygy@disinfo.net)