Bondo: the guitars arrive late and stay anyway

Bondo's third album is in no hurry, and it says so in the first minute. The LA quartet plays the glacial end of slowcore and post-rock as if that era never closed. Eleven tracks, out now on Solid Brass, and patience is the method throughout.

Two records got them here: Print Selections in 2023, Harmonica in 2024. Two albums in three years, then a self-titled, which is usually what a band does when it wants to redraw its own line. Bondo goes backward instead. The quartet digs into the improvisatory end of '90s slowcore and post-rock and stays there, so the commitment deepens and the direction holds.

Everything here is patient ensemble playing. Parts enter, hold longer than a riff usually gets to hold, and overlap until you cannot tell who moved first. Nobody solos. The record moves by accumulation and refuses to settle.

The sound is knotty and menacing, and more melodic than either word suggests. Guitars wander and collide, then lock. The rhythm section plays as if it knows where the next bar goes and would rather not say. Codeine is the nearest ancestor for the weight, early Mogwai for the volume when the volume comes, Tortoise for the way a pattern gets taken apart while it is still running. What Bondo add is air. Their quiet passages are genuinely quiet, and they last.

On The Cross opens and sets the terms: long approach, melody withheld, payoff spent slowly. Listen Back and Strummer follow and are where the band's tunefulness surfaces first, the closest this record gets to a chorus. Then side two turns out to be the better half.

While My Guitar Gently Peaks keeps surviving its own interruptions. Zuma gets stripped to rhythm and rebuilt. The title track, Bondo, sits fourth from the end, late for a band to put its own name on a song, and it is the least decorated thing here. Meta World Peace takes the record out on the quietest note available.

What does not work is the joke in the titles. While My Guitar Gently Peaks and Meta World Peace are funny once, then they sit on an album that otherwise plays it straight, and a record this committed to its own weather can carry only so much winking. The first side withholds melody so long that one stretch blurs into the next, and that blur is not the good kind.

This is for people who put on Codeine or early Mogwai and let a side run instead of skipping to the single. It is not for a commute, or for anyone who needs the hook inside thirty seconds. Play it at night, loud, with nothing else running.

Three albums in, Bondo have a method and not yet a formula, which is the right order. That is a 3.5: the best stretches here are excellent, the patience is earned, and the two jokes on the sleeve are the only thing the record cannot pay for. Start on side two, then go back to the top.

The tracklist

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