Your ability to appreciate Bardo Pond will vary according to your ability to stomach excessive outbreaks of heavy-lidded noodling. For the Philadelphia collective live in a house that noodling built. Many a band’s professed an interest in psychedelically frazzled freak-outs. Few are as willing to ditch their stopwatches in order to head out on unhurriedly evolving, free range jams as the six-piece, whose self-titled – their eight since their emergence in the early 90’s, not counting numerous side projects and archival releases – pretty much perfects their singular take on droning, heavily medicated repetition.

Some things have changed since 2006’s colossal ‘Ticket Crystals’– the vocals of Isobel Sollenberger (imagine Kim Gordon in the throes of acute narcolepsy) feature more prominently in places, and the band’s willing to try on subtly different templates here. Opener ‘Just Once’ sounds like a deliberately detuned, harp-wailing country lament, although the pain-stripping waves of amp abuse that soon trample over all else wipe out any notion of a distorted front-porch hoedown. ‘Don’t Know About You’ sounds like a fairly conventional rock ‘n’ roll tune, albeit one that’s thoroughly disfigured by storm clouds of scuzz-fuelled feedback and bad trip attitude.

Bardo Pond’s unswerving dedication to undiluted improvisation’s unlikely to make them a household name. A track title ala ‘Sleeping’ basically hands ammunition to the opposition. In the wrong hands, the weightless, shapeless drift, floating on a foundation of droning hum and twirling flute, could so very easily turn into an ode to terminal dullness akin to listening to a bunch of convicts in some particularly unkempt hippie diehard commune trying to compose music in the throes of weed-induced lethargy. Granted, the 20 plus minute ‘Undone’ will sorely test some listeners patience (although it actually gets pretty intense around the 10 minute mark, if you have the inclination to hang around for that long).

But any detours to nodsville are more than amply compensated for by the highlights, such as aforementioned ‘Sleeping’ and especially the soothing closer ‘Wayne’s Tune’. As with rest of ‘Bardo Pond’, nothing much that dramatic happens during this relatively swift 8-minute instrumental: guitars – including a detuned slide – are plucked without any sense of real urgency whilst drums keep up a groove so elemental you suspect the percussionist would’ve had to pay a hefty price for each extra movement. Bardo Pond, however, retain their ability to cook up something thoroughly hypnotic, compelling, even majestic, and at times deeply moving, with the least promising of ingredients.