slowcore

Bondo have good taste. The first song, ‘On The Cross’, starts out like Mogwai’s ‘R U Still In 2 It’, and the second, ‘Listen Back’, like Slowdive’s ‘Dagger’. The third, ‘Strummer’, could be an outtake from Slint’s Spiderland. In each case the resemblance is fleeting and the song ends up somewhere else, so Bondo are hardly short of ideas. The references just tell you what’s in their record collections.

So you’ll have a sense of the sound already: post-rock, slowcore, shoegaze. You can hear Tortoise, Codeine and Duster in there too. Some songs meander along glacially, while others, like ‘Brian Screams’, are propelled by guitars and loud vocals. All the name-dropping is only there to anchor you. This record is a great modern example of the sound, and the songs are expansive and easy to get lost in.

I said in September’s recap that I’d give this another couple of spins, and I’m glad I did: it opens up the more you play it. At the time I called it ‘slowcore-ish’, which is true as far as it goes.

The easy comparison would be Berman or Malkmus relocating to northern California and making a CSNY record. Wry couplets about workplace mediocrity, theologians, fish fingers, all set to a gently rocking country-rock backdrop. But the easy comparison isn’t quite the right one. Mildred are four roughly equal parts, all sharing vocals and writing; as a result the songs feel passed around the room rather than handed down from a bossy frontman.

Age matters too, perhaps. This is a debut by friends who started living together in their early thirties and ended up writing some songs; what emerged has none of the showy push of a younger band. “Charlie” ambles along on accordion and horn, “Cobwebs” has a brisk motorik thing going underneath some genuinely bleak lines, and “Fish Sticks” lands its chorus with confidence. The whole thing sounds like it was played live in a room, their interviews suggest that more or less it was.

It’s warm, confident, relaxed, reminiscent of plenty of wonderful things without being in thrall to any of them. The kind of record that turns up on a friend’s stereo and you ask what it is.