Bondo Restores the Feeling on Harmonica Without Sounding Like a Throwback

A harmonica’s no trimanica (three men, three harmonicas, one mic, all in a triangle) but it’s still a glorious instrument that can do a lot of ill in the wrong hands. It’s easy to proudly, confidently bleat out some broken blues when you have no idea what you’re doing on a harmonica, and really hard to play it with the proper force, delicacy and restraint. It’s the same with the current wave of rock bands fetishizing certain sounds from the ‘90s underground; anyone can chain a bunch of pedals together and play at ear-bleeding volume, but it takes a fair helping of craft, smarts and good taste to channel what made “shoegaze” worth listening to 33 years ago. And just playing very deliberately doesn’t mean you fit the “slowcore” tag. It’s not just skill—both musical and in terms of songwriting—that’s needed, but an intelligence and intentionality required to justify comparisons to the true greats of those, or any, genres. And honestly, if you’re going to look to a mid ‘90s Midwestern scene for additional inspiration, it’ll always be better to go with the Chicago and Louisville post-rock bands instead of the emo dross that has been so heavily propped up over the last couple of decades. 

Bondo gets it right. The L.A. band’s new album Harmonica could be slotted into so many of the overused revival buzzwords of today, and although it does draw from some of the elements and dynamics of both of the two-syllable, eight-letter ‘90s genres that start with the letter “s,” it’d be so limiting and uninspired to sum this band up as either. 

Still, as loath as I am to describe any enterprising young band as “shoegaze” or “slowcore” at this late a date, especially one as good as this (seriously, music critics using those terms are as hackneyed as the bands still trying to sound like whatever they think they mean), it’s still true that Bondo are not entirely divorced from whatever positive connotations those terms might still possibly have. The words have been killed by publicists and music writers and Indieheads and RYM, but the sounds still resonate, and Harmonica is one of the few recent records I’ve heard that capture the original feeling of either. Thankfully it’s on a song-by-song basis, not an album-length attempt at another misguided resurrection, and by only occasionally dipping into those waters Bondo keeps them pleasantly warm and steady. They’re not latching onto trends well past their sell date, but sifting through a broad range of the right inspirations, and the result is a rock record worth reckoning with. 

Across its 11 songs, Harmonica remains patient, unhurried, and melodic, with judicious use of noise and speed, only fitfully resorting to volume and heft not because it’s expected or pleases the listener but because it fits the song and the flow of the album. These songs were recorded live, with no overdubs, and in that sparseness you can hear the tightness of the band’s connection and the reserve with which they approach their music, even when the two guitars reach their maximum racket and the band approaches hardcore velocity. It helps that even when their songs do move in somewhat predictable directions, the voicing of the guitars and the constant fluidity of the bass keeps things interesting. Harmoica gives off the calm, jazzbo warmth of Karate or Tortoise at their most direct, or like The Sea and Cake with a more urgent desire to rock. It’s nice.

Bondo doesn’t blow any new notes on Harmonica, but they do enter themselves into an underrated lineage of right-thinking bands who could be reasonably connected to a number of different underground genres of the early-to-mid ‘90s without ever shamelessly aping their most restrictive sounds or aesthetics. And given how much of the conversation from that era has just been repeated again over the last decade, word-for-word, but misapplied to bands and sounds that don’t fit, it’s commendable that Bondo has skipped the discourse and made a record that sounds not just like today or 1992 but potentially timeless. We’ll see how it ages, but for now I’ll be keeping this Harmonica in my back pocket.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about music, videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.